Census, the leading Data Activation platform that syncs customer data from data warehouses to key business tools, has released a new dbt macro package called dbt_census_utils. This package is designed to provide the building blocks for data management and activation, making user data normalization simpler and more efficient for dbt users.
As businesses strive to provide better personalization, making data in the warehouse actionable in business applications has become imperative. However, challenges often arise in the form of data mismatches, format inconsistencies, and pipeline failures. The dbt_census_utils package, containing six macros, helps analytics engineers eliminate the need for extensive custom SQL. Data teams can now confidently and rapidly deliver large volumes of data to downstream tools, and focus more on advanced analysis and less on mundane data management tasks.
The package was built by Stephen Ebrey, founder of data consultancy Sawtelle Analytics. In addition to being an active member of the dbt Community, Stephen acts as a Data Champion for Census's Operational Analytics Club, aimed at helping data practitioners build successful careers. The dbt_census_utils package can be used by Census and non-Census users alike to make their data activation workflows more efficient.
“dbt is a powerful tool for many data professionals,” Ebrey said. “I built the census_utils package to make it easy for analytics engineers to identify and normalize users, and send the right customer data to their customer-facing tools. As an activation platform that connects sources and destinations, I believe Census is uniquely suited to publish dbt packages that combine the best practices of how top data teams organize users and how APIs like Facebook's and Google's require user data to be sent."
These macros are specially designed for unique data activation challenges that traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools do not solve, such as:
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Identifying personal emails vs business emails
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Cleaning names for advertising destinations
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Standardizing country codes.
“dbt packages help analytics engineers with battle-tested macros for common use cases,” Census CEO Boris Jabes said. “This new package features a lot of the macros we’ve seen people need when putting their data into action in SaaS applications. We’re excited to share these with the community to make data insights actionable.”
Census will host a webinar with Ebrey June 5 at 10 am PT on the lessons learned from building the first dbt package for data activation. You can register here.
For more information about dbt_census_utils, read the full write-up here. You can find the dbt_census_utils package itself here.
About Census
Census turns data warehouses into a hub for marketing and business operations, empowering everyone with trustworthy and actionable data from a single source of truth. With its Data Activation platform, powered by reverse ETL (extract, transfer, and load), data teams can validate and publish analytics directly into all their applications in real time. Hundreds of companies like Canva, Figma, Loom, and Notion use Census to sync billions of records to empower their customer success, sales, and marketing teams. Census is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Partners, Sequoia, and Tiger Global. For more information, visit www.getcensus.com or follow @census on Twitter.