Case Study: Operationalizing Data Flows for Speed
Situation
A client migrated external (client – facing) reporting from Tableau to Sigma: however, visualization load times were egregiously slow due to the lack of caching of data and/or the right semantic layer. The task was to compress data tables leveraged by external dashboards (data products) so that the load times were reduced significantly.
Action
The team worked with the Sigma product team to understand how their tool indexed and searched for data and followed that pattern to pivot the data so that queries sped up from 5+ min to roughly 15 seconds through our rework of the semantic layer.
Takeaway
The bulk of the work was done in a week and with partnership of a lead Analytics Engineer we came out with a few action items that were significant learnings across the company about our data, how we leverage tools, and what acceptable load times should be.
Results
Reduced load times of visualizations from 5+ minutes to less than 15 seconds. Goal was to get below 5 seconds.
Uncovered best practices and comparable pros/cons of Sigma vs Tableau.
