Introduction
Data Sharing is one of two tools provided by Piano Analytics to facilitate the extraction of raw, granular, and comprehensive analytics data.
Data Sharing enables Piano clients access to their raw analytics directly from the data table via SQL queries.
Data Flow is available as an alternative to Data Sharing to access granular and comprehensive data extracts. Read the dedicated documentation for Data Flow here for more information.
The raw, granular, and comprehensive data provided by Data Sharing or Data Flow is perfectly suited for many advanced, custom projects tailored to your business needs.
Data Schema
Event Table
A data schema represents a schematic blueprint for an analytics solution in much the same way an architectural blueprint serves as the foundation for a house. I.e. it defines how many “rooms” the house has and what size they will be.
The Snowflake data schema is designed to be both scalable and flexible. In this sense, one can effectively build a house of any size, with as many rooms as one wants.
When you use Data Sharing provided by Piano Analytics, it’s a set package. This means one data table (i.e. a house with one room), that’s referred to as an “event” table.
Events & Properties
Event tables are populated with end users’ actions on your website or online platform. On each line, Piano stores an event that occurred during the customer journey (e.g. pageview, subscription, video start, chat start). These events can quickly add up and number in the millions and billions. Piano can store an unlimited amount of event types.
These events also have properties to characterize them (e.g. page name, device type, traffic source, subscription term, etc.), Piano provides over 1400 columns (400 standard, 1000 custom) for event properties that are shared across the whole event table.
Benefits of this data schema
By using such a structure, Piano can provided raw, granular & comprehensive data on the customer journey at the macro or micro levels, making the number of use cases for it endless. This allows you to build a highly customized data model that’s tailored to your business and your objectives.
Access
There are two ways to access Piano Analytics raw data by leveraging Snowflake’s data sharing technology: Reader account access to Piano Analytics database or accessing the raw data via secure data sharing between Snowflake accounts.
Reader Account access
Accessible via the Piano Analytics product option “Data Sharing – Pay Per Use”, you can access your raw data directly via a reader account.
This method of accessing your raw data has two main characteristics:
- Access your raw data via Piano Analytics’ Snowflake database without being a snowflake client.
- Piano Analytics event table and infrastructure is designed and optimized to power Piano Analytics’ various tools. Access to your data with a reader implies no changes in the data structure and schema can be made to the database beyond querying the data. It is however, possible to copy the data via the reader account to your own database or data lake for futher processing.
Data shared directly to your Snowflake account
As an alternative to the reader account you can access a shared version of your Piano Analytics data by leveraging Snowflake’s secure data sharing feature. To benefit from this feature you must subscribed to the Piano Analytics “Data Sharing – delivered to your destination” product option and be a Snowflake client. Snowflake’s data sharing feature works between two Snowflake databases.