Key points
- Snowplow on GCP offers some great benefits; including speed, streaming capabilities and scaling without thinking
- Not so good features; table mutations are smart – but not how you want them. BigQuery – forget everything you know!
- Why Catch.com.au does server side tracking.
- Benefits they see of both client side and server side.
Last week we ran our first Snowplow Meet Up for 2019. Hosted at the fantastic Oneflare Sydney Offices we had over 40 people attending and was a great mix of our clients, Snowplow Open Source users and those with a keen interest in modern analytics. Here’s a recap of the speakers and content:
Mike Robins (Poplin Data CTO) spoke about what’s awesome (and not so awesome) about the GCP Snowplow port. His take outs: Streaming and Speed are awesome, table mutations is not so awesome, and when it comes to BigQuery – forget everything you thought you knew! Mike also put it out there that BigQuery is really fundamentally different to any database you’ve used – and instead of calling it a data lake or data base, is keen to try and call it a Hydrosphere.
Paul Ferrett (Head of Development at Catch.com.au) was our special guest speaker from Melbourne and took the team through the data journey the Catch group has taken over the last 18 months. Goodbye Google Analytics, hello unified data dashboards! As well as taking us through some of their impressive Snowplow stats, Paul took the group through Catch’s approach to server side tracking and the benefits it’s had to the business, particularly in regards to the app.
For more information – we’ve got both sets of slides below.
Stay tuned for our next Meet Up in September 2019.
