FAQs: Data Stream

What is Data Stream?

Data Stream is Demandbase’s customer-data delivery service, enabling seamless integration of your customer-data into your own environment. With Data Stream, your Demandbase data is automatically delivered daily to your data lake, warehouse, cloud provider, or BI tools like Domo, Tableau, and Power BI.

Data stream eliminates daily export and import tasks, saving you significant time. Your Demandbase data is automatically delivered and can be stored alongside your company’s other datasets, providing a comprehensive, unified view. This holistic approach enables deeper insights from a larger, integrated dataset.

By integrating Demandbase data with your company’s existing datasets, you can:

• Develop dashboards efficiently
• Conduct integrated data science research
• Build machine learning models
• Enhance business intelligence
• Perform aggregated analyses alongside other data

What are the advantages of Data Stream delivery?

• Tens of millions of rows of data delivered daily, at-once. This saves you time because you can easily access all the data.
• Avoid “missing” data due to operational issues.
• Demandbase provides support for delivery to cloud data warehouses such as BigQuery and RedShift which also provide programmatic SQL APIs  (REST, JDBC, ODBC) and human/manual SQL UIs.
• Deliver large-data raw format to cloud storage for processing on-demand. 

How can Data Stream enhance targeting and engagement?

Dashboards and Data Integration: Data Stream enables you to build custom dashboards or data warehouses by combining data from multiple sources. This provides a centralized view of your operations.

Customer and Campaign Insights: Gain deeper insights into your customers and campaign performance. Use this data to identify trends, optimize strategies, and uncover opportunities for growth.

• Enhance Account Lists and Campaigns: Leverage these insights by applying them to new or existing account lists and campaigns within the Demandbase One Platform, resulting in improved targeting and performance.
• Keyword Optimization: For example, you might discover new keyword sets through your analysis. Applying these to account lists can help you more effectively target your ad campaigns, maximizing engagement and ROI.

How do I measure the impact of Using Data Stream?

• Time Savings: Measure the time saved by eliminating manual data export and import processes.
• New Dashboards and Reports: Track the number of new active dashboards and reports created using Data Stream data. This indicates how widely and effectively the data is being utilized across teams.
• Metrics from Dashboards: Assess the specific metrics tied to the newly created dashboards to determine improvements in key areas, such as campaign performance or customer insights.
• Business Impact: Evaluate how the data is driving actionable results. For example, if sales recommendations are generated using Data Stream, measure their effectiveness through metrics like revenue growth or conversion rates.

Who is the ideal audience for Data Stream?

The primary purpose of Data Stream is to enable customers to create their own dashboards and run machine learning models. Its main users include data scientists, analysts, and technical marketing operations teams.

For example:

• Data analyst with a strong understanding of their company’s data structure, proficient in SQL, and skilled in Excel and Tableau. This person often collaborates with stakeholders across marketing and product teams to gather business requirements documents (BRDs) for dashboards, driving the insights needed to support decision-making.
• Analytics and BI teams that build dashboards for internal teams such as marketing and sales. 
• Engineers and scientists to do further ETL and/or analysis with technologies like Spark and Hadoop.

What data is included in Data Stream?

See Data Stream Specification document.

What are the delivery options?

See Data Stream Specification document.

How often is data delivered?

Demandbase delivers your data package daily at 7 AM EST, including weekends, to your designated data warehouse, cloud storage, or BI tool. The package contains data from the previous day.

In the initial release, the delivery time cannot be customized to ensure sufficient time for data collection and rollup accuracy. However, once data delivery stabilizes, you will have the option to adjust the delivery time to better suit your needs.

What is the data format?

If your data is delivered to a data warehouse such as BigQuery, you will receive an ongoing partition table. For deliveries in Apache Parquet or CSV format, the data will be provided in raw format.

Ongoing Partition Table: You will receive the same table daily, with additional rows appended to include the new day’s data. A date stamp column will be added to the table, indicating when each row was entered.  This format allows you to query the latest table directly without the need to add new tables to your data warehouse each day, streamlining your data operations.

How much storage do I need?

The daily data package from Demandbase is between 5GB and 15GB in size (uncompressed). If the data is being delivered into the data warehouse, you can specify the length of the historical data you want to keep in the system. If you have a tight quota on storage utilization, you can have your system purge the data that’s older than 6 months.

Is Data Stream compatible with the data warehouse I'm using?

Data Stream will support direct delivery into GCP BigQuery and Amazon Redshift. If you have a cloud data storage service or do not want the data to be delivered into your data warehouse, Data Stream will support delivering into folders in GCP GCS, Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure Blob.

Are there any limitations or restrictions?

You can only choose one delivery mechanism. For example, Demandbase will not deliver the data into S3 and also into BigQuery.

Can Demandbase deliver data if I don't use any of the data warehouses?

If you do not use any of the supported data warehouses, Demandbase can host the data on your behalf. Reach out to your Demandbase account team for more information.

Can I use Data Stream if I host my own data center?

Demandbase supports data delivery exclusively to cloud data warehouses or cloud data storage services.

If you do not use either of these options but are interested in Data Stream, please share your use case with your Demandbase account team or further discussion.

How do I get started with Data Stream?

If you’re interested in Data Stream, please contact your Demandbase account team, who will connect you with the product team. The Demandbase product team will work directly with you implement Data Stream. Due to the complexity of the product, we require a technical contact from your company to collaborate with our team.

You can request a trial data package to explore the contents of Data Stream and understand how to use the data on a daily basis. Demandbase offers a 1-day data delivery for trials. 

To set up the trial, we need the following information:

• The data warehouse or storage service where the data should be delivered.
• The start date for the data delivery.
• Trial or Full Delivery
• Account name & ID
• Contact person’s name 
• Contact person’s title
• Contact person’s email 
• Contact person’s phone number
• Technical contact name (if different from contact)
• Technical contact email (if different from contact)
• Technical contact phone number (if different from contact)
• Delivery start date
• Delivery destination: BigQuery / Redshift / Azure Synapse  / GCS / S3 / Azure Blob / Demandbase Hosted SFTP / Other
• Other delivery information

How often is the data updated?

The data you receive daily through Data Stream includes information up to 12 AM EST (5 AM UTC) of the same day.

Since the data is generated daily, there may be discrepancies between the data delivered via Data Stream and what you see in the Demandbase One Platform at 12 PM EST. This is because Data Stream does not include data from the 12-hour gap between 12 AM and 12 PM EST.

Does data in Data Stream match the data in Demandbase One?

The data from Data Stream comes from the same database that powers the Demandbase One platform, ensuring no discrepancies between the two sources.

However, since Data Stream delivers data daily with a cut-off at 12 AM EST, it does not include data from the same day. This may create a perceived discrepancy when comparing Data Stream with the Demandbase One Platform.

What is the difference between Demandbase Data Stream and Demandbase Data Export API?