Taking a deep dive into your organization’s data can feel like stepping out of an airport in a foreign country for the first time. The world continues to move around you while you freeze, dumbfounded as people whiz past, speaking languages that are as good as gibberish to you.
To the less SQL-savvy, seeing lines of queries can often feel this way: just strings of letters, symbols, numbers, and more scrolling past your screen with little meaning to them.
If you’re creating, managing, or using your business’ data, you’ve inundated yourself in your datasets and projects and know all about them from top to bottom. But while the lay of the land is very local to you, the rest of your colleagues are foreigners in this territory.
Translate your data into meaning
It’s time to make your data less exotic to your collaborators. To truly tap into your data’s full potential, you must include the diverse expertise and perspectives your team has to offer — regardless of their level of query literacy.
That’s why we just launched the ability to create query templates in your data catalog. Now, you can help your business easily explore data and share insights without ever touching a single line of code. Combine that with the ability to upload and query data without spinning up a separate database on data.world and you’ll get your team moving through data quickly and efficiently.
Built on an SQL or SPARQL backbone using parameterized queries, query templates are user-friendly forms that are self-explanatory to your team. They’ll spend less time trying to find specific data and more time making the crucial, evidence-based decisions that drive your business.
Try it out: see query templates in action with this dataset about Fortune 500 profits and revenues.
How you and your team can use this
Query templates shine when you’re working across teams or SQL skill levels. For example:
- Find the Goldilocks audience: Help your Marketing team tailor its next campaign by pulling information contact info from your CRM, email, and more into a single dataset. Create a simple query template to filter through criteria such as demographics, order history and location.
- Empower the front lines, fast: Share a single dataset with distributed teams, providing a query template to filter the data based on specifics like their individual location or product. (The Associated Press does this for 300+ reporters in over 250 locations.)
- Trust the experts: Subject matter experts can often detect meaning behind trends and raw data simply because they’re steeped in a topic. Partner with your Customer Success teams to uncover and explain metrics around user behavior.
Use query templates to grow data-driven cultures
Data’s true potential is limited by outdated barriers from an era when people, data, and impact were disconnected. Data catalog tools address this crucial gap. Together, query templates and parameterized queries help break these barriers. Give them a try to make it easier than ever to send data over to the business team or execs and have confidence that its value is maximized.
- Streamline workflows cross-functionally by increasing accessibility for more team members.
- Gather information on-demand without reliance from others to make decisions smarter and faster.
- Minimize technical questions and maximize insightful analysis.
Empower yourself and your team to achieve more with data, faster. Learn more about query templates and how to get started, and join our Slack community to share what you create.
Want to make your data projects easier/faster/better? Streamline your data teamwork with our Modern Data Project Checklist!
