Designer Cloud FAQs
Answers to Frequently Asked Questions
Overview
What is the Data Engineering Cloud?
An intelligent, collaborative, self-service data engineering cloud platform to transform data, ensure quality, and automate data pipelines, enabling consumable data at any scale.
What is Data Engineering?
Data Engineering is a discipline to transform raw data, assess, validate quality, and deliver usable data. With data engineering, you cover the entire spectrum of transforming raw data into consumable data with steps to connect, prepare, profile, validate, and deploy high-quality, valuable data into production.
Who is the target audience for Designer Cloud?
The Designer Cloud caters to the modern data worker. In other words, It’s valuable for anyone who works with data including analysts, engineers, and scientists. Designer Cloud addresses the requirements of each of these personas with its unique, superior capabilities.
How do I get started with Designer Cloud?
You can get started with Designer Cloud for free with a 30-day trial. As part of the trial, you can experience advanced capabilities of data engineering to transform your raw data into high-quality, consumable data. You can start the free trial on Designer Cloud if your data is on cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, Databricks, and Snowflake as well as on-premise systems, or on Google Cloud with Dataprep by Trifacta if your data is in the Google ecosystem.
With the trial, you can also use pre-built templates for common use cases that you can leverage right away. These templates provide ready-made data flows and recipes that you can use as-is or customize with your own data to achieve the desired results.
How does Designer Cloud work with code?
Designer Cloud gives you complete flexibility when it comes to code. For users who do not wish to use code, Designer Cloud provides intelligent, visual transformations, assesses data sets, and schedules the publication of data without writing a single line of code. If you want to use code, Designer Cloud allows you to bring your own code in a language of your choice including SQL and Python, providing complete integration with your code.
Which cloud platforms are supported by Designer Cloud?
Designer Cloud is a SaaS offering on all leading cloud platforms including Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Databricks, and Snowflake. Designer Cloud offers a seamless experience on all these platforms.
How does Designer Cloud fit into the modern data stack including ELT and ETL processes?
Designer Cloud plays a key role in the modern data stack and can be used throughout the modern ELT architecture as well as the transition from ETL to ELT. Cloud Cloud supports the modern ELT approach handling the individual processes for Extract, Load, and Transform, where transformation is about preparing data and decoupling these processes. This helps with less friction, better control, flexibility, and full transparency. Designer Cloud enables the modern data stack with its self-service architecture and the ability to serve entities such as the modern cloud data warehouse and the unified data warehouse/data lake construct.
Data Transformation
What is Data Transformation?
Data Transformation is the process of converting raw data into useful data for advanced insights and analytics.
How does Designer Cloud deliver data transformation?
Designer Cloud uses advanced techniques such as AI/ML with a visual interface to detect complex data patterns from any source and transform these patterns into useful data. Designer Cloud allows you to preview the suggested data transformations before you commit the changes in an easy, guided, and quick manner.
Where can the transformed data from Designer Cloud be used?
The transformed, high-quality data produced by Designer Cloud can be used in various repositories and applications including cloud data warehouses, AI/ML systems, data pipelines, and applications related to smart analytics and reporting. In general, the output from Designer Cloud can be used wherever high-quality data is required.
Which data sources can I connect to, from Designer Cloud?
Designer Cloud offers Universal Data Connectivity to a wide range of data sources both on-premises and in the cloud. With a self-service architecture, Designer Cloud provides flexible and seamless access to data to support a range of use cases and applications with REST, XML, and JDBC frameworks. Learn more from our integrations page.
Can I share my data transformations with my team?
Yes, Designer Cloud enables data democratization by allowing you to share and collaborate any step of the data engineering process including intermediate and final transformations with your teams. You can comprehend the immediate impact with live and continuous validation from your teams and co-workers. Additionally, you can also share and leverage the larger Trifacta community where you can share, exchange, and learn best practices.
How does Designer Cloud integrate with data pipelines?
Designer Cloud helps you build automated data pipelines at any scale. Using Designer Cloud’s automation and orchestration capabilities, you can operationalize self-service data pipelines quickly and easily. This can help you streamline your data operations enabling efficiency and transparency.
Data Profiling & Quality
What is data profiling?
Data profiling is the process of evaluating the content and quality of data. Data profiling helps determine the accuracy, completeness, and validity of a given dataset.
How does Designer Cloud perform data profiling?
Designer Cloud’s visual, interactive interface is built-in with powerful data profiling capabilities. The interface provides visually compelling representations of the dataset, where Designer Cloud automatically identifies dataset formats, schemas, and specific attributes and relationships, along with associated metadata for each dataset.
What are the benefits of data profiling capabilities provided by Designer Cloud?
The superior data profiling capabilities from Designer Cloud enable quick identification of problems in your dataset, as well as provide actionable insights throughout the lifecycle of your data project. Beyond identification, Designer Cloud provides pattern profiling that alerts anomalous patterns within each data type and suggests script transforms to rectify irregular or incongruent data. Designer Cloud enables you to automate this complete process.
How does Designer Cloud maintain high quality?
Designer Cloud delivers Adaptive Data Quality (ADQ) capabilities with Data Quality Rules, which prevent incorrect or dirty data from contaminating your data project recipes. These rules help you determine whether the current data is fit for use, and what additional data transformations are needed to correct the data. Designer Cloud constantly monitors all data including existing, updated, and new data to apply ADQ rules, to maintain high quality.
Why should I use Data Quality Rules?
The quality of an application or a report is only as good as the input data that it uses. Data Quality Rules provide an automated way to identify flaws in your data and build quality indicators to monitor its remediation. These rules are automatically updated to reflect any changes and takes care of any inadvertent errors caused by human intervention.
How do Data Quality Rules work?
Data Quality Rules are part of the Designer Cloud interface, where it automatically suggests a series of rules to validate various aspects of the quality of your data. Looking at the suggestions, you can accept, ignore, edit, or update these rules to ensure they are fit for your particular use case or dataset. You can also add your own rules using the Designer Cloud Wrangler language to build any additional validations you may need for your use case or application.
Pricing
How does pricing work with Designer Cloud?
Designer Cloud offers a flexible pricing model based on two vectors namely productivity and scale. You are charged based on the number of users and the amount of data processed. You can choose a monthly payment option or an annual payment option that offers a 20% discount on the monthly price. Additionally, you can also choose from three different editions offering you a range of capabilities depending on your business needs.
What are the three pricing editions offered by Designer Cloud?
Designer Cloud offers three pricing editions namely Starter, Professional, and Enterprise. With the Starter edition, you can get started with data engineering with basic capabilities including data transformation, connectivity to cloud data warehouses, data profiling, and sharing and collaboration. The Professional edition offers all these capabilities along with additional capabilities such as Adaptive Data Quality (ADQ) Rules, Universal Data Connectivity to a range of connectors, Automation and Orchestration, and a dedicated customer support representative. The Enterprise edition offers all of the capabilities from Starter and Professional, along with REST API endpoints, security controls such as fine-grained access control, and single-sign on.
Which edition is offered during the Designer Cloud Free Trial?
During the 30-day free trial, Designer Cloud offers all the capabilities on the Enterprise Edition.
Who is defined as a user when it comes to pricing with Designer Cloud?
Any individual who logs in to Designer Cloud with a unique email address is counted as a user of Designer Cloud.
Can I change my pricing edition?
Yes, you can upgrade or downgrade to a different edition at any time. If you choose to upgrade your edition, you’ll pay a prorated amount for that edition for the rest of the month from the time you upgrade. If you choose to downgrade your edition, you’ll be credited with the remaining amount on your bill in the following month.
Can I cancel my subscription to Designer Cloud?
You may choose to cancel at any time. Cancelation will take effect at the end of your current billing cycle.
Can I use my credit card for payment?
Yes, Designer Cloud offers self-service credit card payments.
How can I estimate my consumption charges outside the per-user charges?
During the free trial, you can connect and prepare your data similar to your production environment. The workspace usage page can help you with a display of your consumption, which you can use to estimate your consumption charges. We are working on a calculator that will help you with a more accurate estimate of your charges. The pricing page will include this calculator.