March 2022 Summaries

Sync History Logs provide full record-level observability for operational analytics pipelines, allowing users to audit, troubleshoot, and create alerts using detailed logs of each data point synced with Census. A self-service billing portal has been added, enabling users to upgrade their plan without human interaction. New integrations include Notion, LinkedIn Ads, and Google Analytics, while upcoming live sessions cover topics such as marketing as a data product and the philosophy of Census in the Data Ecosystem. Customers can share their thoughts about Census on G2, an independent review site, and receive a $25 gift card for doing so.

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing platform that offers a scalable and secure way to store, manage, and analyze large amounts of data. Google Ads is a popular advertising platform that allows businesses to create targeted ad campaigns and track their performance. The article discusses three methods for syncing data from Snowflake to Google Ads: manual CSV upload, semi-automated sync using APIs, and fully automated sync using Census reverse ETL. The manual method involves exporting data from Snowflake, importing it into Google Ads, and creating a customer match user list. The semi-automated method uses APIs to export data from Snowflake and import it into Google Ads, but requires setting up API access and handling errors. The fully automated method using Census reverse ETL allows businesses to set up an automatic sync between Snowflake and Google Ads with minimal configuration and error handling. The article concludes that while the manual and semi-automated methods can be done manually, they require more effort and technical expertise, whereas the fully automated method using Census provides a faster and easier way to sync data between Snowflake and Google Ads.

Data professionals have evolved to become essential to an organization's operations and revenue-driving activities, but collaboration with stakeholders has not kept pace. Stakeholders are increasingly technical and data-literate, often running their own analysis for short-term decision making, while data professionals are tasked with supporting immediate revenue-driving activities. To improve collaboration, both parties must understand each other's responsibilities and adapt accordingly, starting with educating themselves about each other's expertise and needs. This includes developing a deeper understanding of the organization as a whole and being attentive in company-wide meetings, goal planning sessions, and other updates. By recognizing stakeholders' technical expertise and honoring their knowledge of what data is most useful to them, data professionals can build trust and deliver higher-quality projects.

Notion's all-in-one workspace aims to replicate in-person collaboration among remote teams by integrating with Census, a data warehouse connector that syncs trusted data from warehouses to Notion tables for collaboration and reporting purposes. This partnership enables business teams to access fresh data automatically, eliminating the need for manual data copying and pasting. With Census and Notion, companies can create dynamic tables for weekly update reports, enrich product research and engineering roadmaps with customer data, and power operational workflows such as pipeline reporting and financial forecasting.

In a significant update, Census has introduced a self-service billing portal allowing users to upgrade their plans without human interaction. This change enables users to manage payment information and access invoices at their convenience. The process involves three easy steps: selecting a plan, confirming and checking out, and then accessing various features such as a free trial, destination connectors, and the Segment Builder. To support customers, Census has provided helpful resources including product documentation, pricing information, and a Slack community. With this update, users can now efficiently manage their plans and take advantage of Census's features without relying on human assistance.

'' A resilient system relies heavily on observability, particularly at the record level, to identify failures and understand why they occurred. Data pipelines interact with various tools and services, leading to potential issues such as data type changes, memory constraints, and buggy code. To address these challenges, Wistia adopted a hub-and-spoke model, where a central data warehouse serves as the single source of truth for business definitions. This approach enables stakeholders to access relevant data in a standardized format, reducing friction and improving data visibility. By leveraging reverse ETL and dbt models, Census helps organizations optimize their pipelines, streamline updates, and reduce overalerting issues, ultimately enabling data teams to focus on more strategic tasks.

Syncing data from BigQuery to Salesforce can be achieved through three separate methods: Data Loader, Data Import Wizard, and Reverse ETL with Census. Each method has its own prerequisites, advantages, and limitations. Data Loader allows importing up to 5 million records at a time, while Data Import Wizard is suitable for smaller imports and requires working knowledge of Python. Reverse ETL with Census, on the other hand, enables syncing larger quantities of data faster and more reliably, making it ideal for automated and regular syncs. By choosing the right method based on their specific needs, users can efficiently move data from BigQuery to Salesforce.

Syncing data from Databricks to Salesforce can be achieved through various methods, as there is no native integration between the two platforms. Exporting data from Databricks using Dataframe in Notebook, Databricks CLI, or JSpark can be done, followed by importing the CSV file into Salesforce using third-party tools like Data Loader or the Data Import Wizard. However, these methods have limitations, such as time-consuming manual processes and limited scalability. A more efficient approach is to use Reverse ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools like Census, which provides flexible integrations with Salesforce and Databricks, automates data synchronization, and offers scheduling features for seamless updates. By choosing the right method, companies can deliver valuable insights and improve operational efficiency by providing rich first-party data to sales teams, creating high-quality email campaigns, and understanding customer behavior.