Google Cloud Dataprep is now a public beta
Eric Anderson
Engineering Lead, gRPC
In March 2017, we announced a private beta release of Google Cloud Dataprep, an intelligent, fully-managed cloud service (built in collaboration with Trifacta) that visually explores, cleans and prepares structured and unstructured data for analysis or training machine-learning models. Today, we’re excited to announce that Cloud Dataprep is available to everyone, as a public beta!
Key Cloud Dataprep features include a visual experience that makes data preparation intuitive and approachable for analysts who want to modify or enrich their datasets directly, without needing to rely on data engineers. And like other services in the GCP data analytics and machine learning stack, Cloud Dataprep runs on serverless infrastructure that handles scalability, performance, availability and security needs for you.
Cloud Dataprep also has intelligence built-in for understanding and automatically operationalizing your particular usage patterns, making data preparation even faster and less prone to user error. The overall result is more productive, efficient and powerful data analytics pipelines, leading to faster time-to-insight.
That said, the best way to understand what Cloud Dataprep can do is by examining some real-world use cases.
Merkle: Quickly analyzing new datasets for better customer relationships
A performance marketing agency specializing in data-based marketing solutions, Merkle Inc. helps its clients maximize their most profitable customer relationships through a framework it calls Connected CRM. Merkle relies on Google Cloud Datastore and Google BigQuery, with Cloud Dataprep bringing new data into BigQuery for analysis.For Merkle, Cloud Dataprep offers a better solution for rapid data ingestion than other tools and techniques. According to Henry Culver, IT Architect at Merkle, “Cloud Dataprep allows us to quickly view and understand new datasets, and its flexibility supports our data transformation needs. The GUI is nicely designed, so the learning curve is minimal. Our initial data preparation work is now completed in minutes, not hours or days.”
Culver adds, “The ability to rapidly see our data, and to be offered transformation suggestions in data delivery, is a huge help to us as we look to rapidly assimilate new datasets.”
Venture Development Center: Delivering Big Data strategies with GCP, Cloud Dataprep and BigQuery
Founded in 1996, Venture Development Center (VDC) LLC is an advisory services company that helps its clients define, identify and implement big data use cases that can lead to business transformation and data monetization. Cloud Dataprep and BigQuery are key ingredients in its platform for delivering those services.As explained by Matthew W. Staudt, President of VDC, “We needed a platform that was versatile, easy to utilize and provided a migration path as our needs for data review, evaluation, hygiene, interlinking and analysis advanced. We immediately knew that Google Cloud Platform, with Cloud Dataprep and BigQuery, were exactly what we were looking for. As we develop our capability and movement into the data cataloging, QA and delivery cycle, Cloud Dataprep allows us to accomplish this quickly and adeptly."
