I work with a lot of data (who doesn’t?) and I need to make it usable and actionable to deliver advanced insights for my applications. I wish I could look at some ready-made examples, especially for common tasks and use cases and follow along. If you are thinking like me, look no further as I have the right solution for you. I am thrilled to announce the newly launched ready-to-use, pre-built Templates for Designer Cloud, the intelligent, visual data engineering cloud.
Why do we need Templates?
Data engineering involves multiple aspects of working with data including collection, transformation, and analysis. Lack of practical examples to understand these aspects better and achieve high-quality, usable data hinders the progress of data engineering. But this problem is a thing of the past. You can now engineer your data quickly and easily with pre-built templates from Designer Cloud that enable you to wrangle your data faster and better. These templates provide a solid foundation for you to get started with your data engineering tasks and scale your data to meet the demands of your business.
At Trifacta (acquired by Alteryx), we just launched 16 new templates that are ready-to-use and cover common use cases to help you in your data engineering tasks. Within the Designer Cloud, these templates are readily discoverable, accessible, and re-usable. Visit the templates gallery to browse a wide gamut of templates along with the use cases they cover. On-boarding and getting started with Designer Cloud is now easier and faster with these templates.
What can we do with Templates?
Now, let’s look at a couple of common use cases where these templates can be used right away.
Remove redundancy and transform data
Redundancy in tabular data is very common and we often observe the same data is present across multiple columns. It is cumbersome to remove this redundancy and clean the data. The problem becomes trickier if we want to remove rows where the data is duplicated in only certain columns from a dataset containing many rows and columns. Using this template to remove duplicate data, you can easily find and remove rows when there are duplicate values in a subset of columns. You can customize this template with your data by including all columns you want to check and remove duplicates. Whether your data is small or big, resides on Amazon S3 or in Google Cloud Storage, go ahead and eliminate all those duplicates. The screenshot below shows you the flow view of this template.
Marketing and Sales Data Analysis
Performing analysis on marketing and sales data, and forecasting future sales is common across businesses. If you are working with a large amount of data from a CRM system, data transformation and analysis can get quite complex and it is time-consuming. With this ready-made template focused on sales analytics, you can load data from your CRM system, transform the data, and get the required information for advanced analytics. The template contains a sample flow where two datasets containing sales opportunities and owners for each opportunity are automatically loaded for you. Furthermore, the flow features different recipe steps to transform and clean the data such as removing unnecessary attributes, standardizing column values, calculating rolling averages of sales metrics, and forecasting future sales data from base metrics. You can leverage the built-in flow and recipe from this template, customize it using your own data, and perform your analysis to meet your requirements. We are confident it is going to save you a lot of time and effort. The screenshot below is a flow view of this template.
I have just touched the surface here. Check out the other templates in the gallery that you’ll find valuable and useful for your use case.
Looking Ahead
This is just the start of an exciting journey ahead. Stay tuned as we add many more templates in the near future with additional use cases focused on data engineering. These templates will not only get you started with data engineering, but also help you scale your data towards better business outcomes.
Get started for free with Designer Cloud today and leverage these templates. If you are already a Designer Cloud user, simply download any template from the gallery and import it into your workspace. Check out our community page on how you can import downloaded templates into your workspace. In an upcoming release, you will be able to use these templates right away without any downloads.
We are excited to launch these templates to help you accelerate your data journey with Designer Cloud.