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Data Modeling in NetSpring

Data modeling in NetSpring is the process of mapping the existing tables in your data warehouse into NetSpring datasets. NetSpring’s warehouse native architecture makes it easy for teams to leverage and reuse the existing schemas, tables, and governance for the your business’ product analytics needs. There is no need to set up new pipelines, copy data to third party storage, or migrate existing data to rigid new schemas.

This guide will help you with:

  • Creating new connections to warehouses,
  • Best practices for setting up datasets in NetSpring, and
  • Requirements for the source tables or views in the warehouse.

Rich text support for column, event and dataset descriptions​

Data warehouses support adding free-text comments or descriptions to columns and tables. NetSpring automatically inherits these description fields from the data warehouse as follows:

Column descriptions​

  • For source datasets, column descriptions are inherited directly from the corresponding column descriptions in the warehouse.
  • For union datasets, descriptions are inherited from a column with the same name in one of the child tables. Typically, columns with the same name across child tables will share the same description.
  • For other dataset types, no column descriptions are inherited since there is no direct correlation between warehouse columns and NetSpring columns.

Table descriptions​

  • For source datasets, descriptions are inherited directly from the table descriptions in the warehouse.
  • For other dataset types, no descriptions are inherited since there is no direct correlation between warehouse tables and NetSpring datasets.

Event descriptions​

  • For union event datasets, if a specific child table represents an event type, the warehouse description for that child table will be used as the description for the corresponding event type.
  • For other dataset types, no event descriptions are inherited since there is no direct correlation between warehouse events and NetSpring events.
info

For all description types mentioned, the text is refreshed nightly from the data warehouse. However, if a user manually updates a description, the automatic refresh will be disabled. If the user deletes the manual description, warehouse descriptions will be reapplied.

note

This feature is currently available for Snowflake and in Beta for other data warehouses.

Before Getting Started:​

  1. Make sure you have been provisioned a NetSpring account and can log in. Reach out to your NetSpring administrator for help.
  2. Navigate to the correct data app, or create a new one.