Back in the old days, marketing was ridden with a lot of guesswork. Sometimes, unexpected campaigns brought new leads and converted prospects into customers. Other times, the best-designed campaigns flopped, the market remained unmoved and all you could hear after the launch of a campaign was silence. Data-driven marketing rose from the pains of this insecurity and took on the overwhelming growth of data for its support.

Similar to other companies in the entertainment industry, gaming companies typically drive revenue from three sources: in-app purchases, ads, and subscription. A couple of examples of these sources include creating different in-app purchase options for each game and various ad units from multiple ad networks. While this diversity in revenue streams may be advantageous from a business perspective, from a technical standpoint, it creates numerous challenges.

As a BI Analyst, have you ever encountered a dashboard that wouldn’t refresh because other teams were using it? As a data scientist, have you ever had to wait 6 months before you could access the latest version of Spark? As an application architect, have you ever been asked to wait 12 weeks before you could get hardware to onboard a new application?

Companies realize that in order to grow, connect products and services, or protect their business, they need to become data-driven. In selecting the tools to realize these goals, organizations effectively have two choices: a self-selected combination of analytics tools and applications or a unified platform that handles all. In this blog we will discuss the challenges of the former choice that will provide justification for the latter.

One thing nearly all such data providers have is a REST API. Snowflake’s recently announced external functions capability allows Snowflake accounts to call external APIs. By using external functions, data enrichment providers can fulfill requests for data from Snowflake Data Marketplace consumers.

After Alooma announced it was sunsetting its services for Redshift customers, Aceable moved to Fivetran for data integration. In one week, the business integrated all of its sources, including MongoDB — a project that was never completed with Alooma. With Fivetran, Aceable eliminates the need for back-end maintenance and adds Jira to its stack to track project progress across the entire org.

Apache Hadoop-Ozone is a new-era object storage solution for Big Data platform. It is scalable with strong consistency. Ozone uses Raft protocol, implemented by Apache Ratis (Incubating), to achieve high availability in its distributed system. My team in Tencent started to introduce Ozone as a backend object storage in production a few months ago and we’re onboarding more and more data warehouse users.