Data Designer BETA feedback

I agree with all of this feedback! In terms of the config step, I’ve been having to manually configure the data sets I’ve created a couple times a day because they’re ones I know are getting actioned on/updated frequently and mgmt is looking at - would be nice to be able to set this systematically long term.

Thanks for the feedback @angela_domenichelli . For your feedback on analysis - did you know that the dataspace that you build in Data Designer can be used in Report Builder? From there you can build and share dashboards for internal stakeholders, or embed a single report into a Journey Orchestrator program for external stakeholders, or even embed that report into a Shared 360 for external stakeholders. Tons of flexibility!

@rakesh for input on the other areas of feedback

@lila_meyer can we move this to the Beta Program section, please?

Hi @angela_domenichelli,

Completely agree with the feedback on the prep and analyze part. We are working on multiple ideas to improve performance during the prep step. 

On the analyze part, once you promote design to a Data Space, we want to provide a publish reports to reports repository functionality whereby you can reuse them. There are some challenges with this and we plan to address it in our short term roadmap. 

On the configure part, today, Data Designer refreshes the entire dataset. It is really challenging to provide real-time data for large datasets. Can you provide the approximate number of records you would have in your designs?  

Hi Rakesh,

Thanks for following up.  My request for real-time data might not be practical in anyway, especially since I can see our company creating many different data designer reports with thousands of records each.  We do not want to compromise performance.  However, if I built a report on a single SFDC object, it would update in real-time and that is the experience CSMs are expecting.  A report delayed event 1 hour is a differentiated experience from a CSM experience point of view.  

For example, if I am building a report on the Case object from SFDC and the case is moved to a status of needs more information from the client, the CSM would see that in real-time.  If I am using Data Designer and merge the Case object, now the soonest the CSM can know about the change in status is the following day.  To the CSM, they don’t know or care about how the backend of a report was built, they just want to current information for their call that day.

Does that make sense?

Hi @dan_ahrens !  I am interested to know more.  In the training materials for Analysis Details in Data Designer I read :

So I did not pursue trying to publish data designer analysis to Report Builder / c360.  I have used the dataspace to create a report in report builder, but do not find much value in the Analysis section of the data designer unless it can also be published to Report Builder.

Ah, sorry @angela_domenichelli I might have misunderstood your feedback on the Analyze portion. You are correct that the visualizations that you build in Analyze cannot be used in Gainsight Reports/Dashboards, but the raw data object can be used in Gainsight Reports/Dashboards.

Echo this in that when we are leveraging data design to aggregate information that is from Salesforce and join it with other aggregated data, it would be helpful to have any Salesforce driven data be real time. Anything else would cause confusion or misrepresentation for our users. 

What you say totally makes sense @angela_domenichelli  . I will explore more about what we can do to achieve more realtime data without impacting performance. Meanwhile, on the highlighted part, I have one question: If you were to build a report on a single object, why not use Report Builder directly? What is stopping you from using the existing Report Builder? 

@samantha_braastad and @angela_domenichelli  What sort of data refresh might be acceptable for your use cases? Would a 3-4 hour delay make sense or would you necessarily need real time?

Problem with realtime is that if we aggregate vast amounts of data from multiple sources and join and precompute some formulae on top of it, it would take more than a few minutes to render that report. Hence we took the tradeoff. 

There is some data that would be best real time and others that would not. Ideally, the refresh schedule could be set in the preparation section for each piece of data based on that data’s refresh need. For example, if I want to combine usage date that is loaded daily with Salesforce case data I could set the usage data for daily and the Salesforce data for real time (or every 15 minutes). 

Hi Rakesh,

To answer your questions:

 If you were to build a report on a single object, why not use Report Builder directly? What is stopping you from using the existing Report Builder? 

We probably wouldn’t use Data Designer to build on a single object as it stands today (although, we have not explored all use cases and differences that would make Data Designer useful) but we do merge these single objects in Data Designer.  

What sort of data refresh might be acceptable for your use cases? Would a 3-4 hour delay make sense or would you necessarily need real time?

Any improvement for us to select increments more often than once a day are preferred.  Even if we were able to set 4 times daily for it to run, we could set an expectation the report is updated at 8 am, 11 am and 2 pm and 5 pm, for example, and not have it run unnecessarily overnight when there are infrequent changes.  Ideal state is Salesforce data refreshes in the data space real-time, the same as if a report was built on the single object.

Thanks for doing the additional discovery!

Hi Are we going to allow for Cron schedules for data designer? My data set is ~150 records and takes about 11 seconds to run, I’d like to schedule this like rules to run every 2 hours. 

Hello Steve!

Happy to announce that your request has been considered and included as part of the v6.16 release. With this release, Data Designer is introducing an Advanced Scheduler which uses Cron Expressions to refresh the Data Space. This enables you to refresh the data more frequently, compared to the existing (Basic) scheduler. And, Advanced Scheduler also addresses some of the advanced use cases including refreshing the Data Spaces as frequently as every two hours, or on a less frequent basis to match business processes, such as on the 1st and 15th of the month.

This feature is implemented in both SFDC & NXT versions.

Thanks for posting!