New

We're trying really hard not to make an alert on alerts joke, but we've got some new exciting updates to sync alerting.

👉 New per sync alert for skipped/rejected records

Now you can enable email alerts when syncs encounter skipped and failed records. Go to the new Alerts tab in your Sync to configure which alerts are enabled per sync so you can crank up the alerts for those mission critical syncs.

👉 Alerts for the whole team

Everyone on your Census team will now receive alert emails by default so you don’t have to worry about missing a thing.

👉 Configure your personal email notifications

If you’ve got enough going on in you inbox, you can always disable email notifications in your User Settings page.

→ Configure your alert settings now

What other alerts would you like added? Send us an email or a message in our live chat 🙏

New

In addition to sending contact information to Google Audiences, you can also have Census remove them when they’re no longer in your audience. We’ll keep your audience in perfect sync with your data warehouse. This means you can use a single source of truth for your audience model and keep it in sync all your advertising platforms e.g. Facebook Ads, Google Ads.

To get started, select the Mirror Sync option when setting up you Google Ads sync.

You can read more about syncing to Google Ads in our docs 📚.

Changelog

We’re recovering from the long weekend with our own set of data fireworks this week. Two big new features for you: Alerts Emails for syncs with rejected/invalid records, and Slack as a destination!

Failed Record Alerts

Now you can enable email alerts when syncs encounter skipped and failed records. Each Sync now has an Alerts tab which lets you configure which alerts are enabled per sync so you can crank up the alerts for those mission critical syncs.

Sync to Slack

Census lets you sync to Slack as a destination! This is a nifty way to create human readable notifications when new records appear in your database. We’ve got some fancy things planned for Slack so give it a shot and let us know how you’re using it!

And we’ve got a few more quality of life improvements this week:

• HubSpot now supports Products and Line Items!
• Model Editor now shows data types and warns when a model has duplicate column names.
• Syncs no longer have “Unscheduled” status now that they can be triggered programmatically. Instead, they’ll show a status “as of” the most recent run. If they haven’t been run in over a week, the status will be greyed out.
• Customers using the dbt integration no longer need to provide Census with additional permissions, we’ll reference the materialized table directly.

It’s a short week this week but we still have a few things for you.

First, you can now remove users from your org in the settings page. If you need to add them again, just invite them.

We also fixed an annoying issue where Census models with duplicated column names wouldn’t get caught during previews, but would cause issues creating a sync. Now you’ll see errors during model creation so you can fix immediately.

Finally we added clearer warnings and errors for BigQuery STRUCT data types. It's not always obvious what to do with a STRUCT so whenever you can, pull the specific values you want as part of your query or model

That’s it for this week. For our US-based friends, have a great long weekend! 🎆

Two big releases this week!

• Facebook Offline Conversions are now available as a destination
• Airflow package is now live on the Astronomer Registry

We've also got a few UI improvements for you:

• Data Warehouses now allow Census models and a connected dbt project at the same time! No need to add a second warehouse connection to use both in parallel any more.
• For unknown errors, Census will now show the underlying stack trace we saw. Sometimes it’s helpful for faster debugging, but not always. If you’re confused and need a hand, feel free to reach out to Census support at any time!

And a raft of small connector performance changes including:

• Google BigQuery now uses the same set of static IPs as other warehouses so you can restrict Census access to certain IP addresses.
• Better error handling with Google Adwords == faster syncs!
• Use Amplitude’s min-id-length parameter to enable syncing short IDs

Changelog

This week we added a brand new user setting that allows you to control what timezone to use when displaying times in the Census UI. Now you can control whether to use local time, or UTC for the purists. The setting is unique to each user and only applies to Census UI, we wouldn’t dare touch your data!

One more feature and one fix this week:

• Enabled syncing to Iterable events
• Fixed two issue with dbt Cloud integration related to dbt Cloud jobs that use multiple steps or include snapshot steps. Should be much more predictable now!

Changelog

There’s something for everyone this week as we made a number of improvements to our existing suite of connectors:

• HubSpot Deals objects are now available as a destination
• You’ll now always see a Salesforce account picker when connecting a new Salesforce connection (Thanks Roy!).
• Marketo connections no longer require having Custom Object permissions
• Syncs will always highlight mappings with type conversion warnings first (Hadley’s very first change!)

Finally, we improved the Getting Started documentation for Custom Destinations API. If you’ve been thinking about trying it out but haven’t given it a shot yet, take another look!

Changelog

A little bit of new UI in Census this week! Now when a new member of your team signs up to Census without an invite, they’ll get asked if they’d like to join your team first. No more lost teammates!

There's also a new Getting Started with the Custom Destination API for those excited to connect to more services.

And as always, a few minor features and fixes:

• Added support for Redshift Late Binding Views
• Fixed dbt Cloud integration bug where environments running on 0.19 wouldn’t trigger Census syncs correctly
• Fixed bug when using Census to create new fields in Braze with a Databricks source
• Fixed a false error when reauthorizing Facebook Ads connections
• Facebook connections now show Ad Account ID in Services Page
• Performance improvements to Zendesk and Salesforce Marketing Cloud integrations
• Fixed our Customer.io connector getting aggro and incorrectly reporting a good connection as broken

We released a new way to trigger a sync, this time not a schedule, but via API or via dbt Cloud.

New

Trigger a sync via API

Go to any sync configuration page, and you should see a new "trigger API" option to reveal the endpoint you can send a POST request to.

Trigger a sync via dbt Cloud

Once you have connected Census to your git repo that is hosting your dbt models (see docs), you will now have the option to enable our dbt cloud sync.

You can read more on how to use this new way of triggering syncs in our documentation 📚

New

This April had a torrent of new features land in Census! Here's the recap of what made it into the product this month!

New Connectors

• Custom Connector API BETA - Now you can built your own Census connectors. We'd love your feedback on our beta API for defining new connectors.
• ActiveCampaign as a new marketing destination

Existing Connector Improvements

• Group support for Mixpanel and Amplitude
• Marketo Mirror Syncs and wider identifiers
• Download full list of Salesforce rejections
• Netsuite: More objects (Sales Orders, Vendors and more!)

Data Warehouse connector improvements

• dbt integration updated to 0.19.1
• SSH tunnel reliability improvements with tuned keep-alive

Security

• Force everyone in your organization to use Google SSO only. For example, to require all users to use two-factor authentication.