Atlan > Case Studies > Snapcommerce's Journey to Effective Data Cataloging

Snapcommerce's Journey to Effective Data Cataloging

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Databases

Applicable Industries

Cement
Equipment & Machinery

Applicable Functions

Maintenance

Use Cases

Asset Health Management (AHM)
Time Sensitive Networking

About The Customer

Snapcommerce is a tech-savvy organization that is building the next generation of mobile shopping across three verticals: travel, fintech, and goods. As the company quickly scaled from one to three verticals, its business stakeholders remained active users of its data platform and assets. Most Snapcommerce employees autonomously write SQL and build dashboards/reports to solve their day-to-day questions. The company recognized a need for source-of-truth documentation in a user-friendly format that would support their ongoing requirement and adoration for self-serve tools.

The Challenge

Snapcommerce, a tech-savvy organization that operates in the travel, fintech, and goods verticals, faced a challenge as it scaled its operations. The company's employees, who are active users of its data platform and assets, needed a reliable source-of-truth documentation in a user-friendly format to support their ongoing requirement for self-serve tools. The company was looking for a way to standardize and share data definitions across the organization. They also wanted a solution that eliminated the need for coding by business stakeholders and provided quick navigational capabilities. The challenge was to find a data catalog that met their specific criteria, including an easy-to-navigate interface, strong search capability, an automated crawler, clear definitions/glossary section, permission handling, a table preview and SQL component, and data lineage visualizations.

The Solution

Snapcommerce went through a selection process to find the best data catalog for their use case. They collected feedback from business stakeholders and evaluated tools based on their requirements. Atlan emerged as their favored tool, meeting their basic requirements and offering less commonly available, yet highly useful, features such as data lineage, user permission settings, and a glossary. The data lineage feature was particularly helpful for updating code, fixing bugs, onboarding, and deleting unused assets. User permissions enabled them to restrict and enable access depending on the asset’s sensitivity level, and the glossary hosted stakeholder-verified definitions for metrics in one place. The implementation of the data catalog required significant time and effort, including the building of data definitions and glossaries for all common tables and metrics in their database. The data analysts and engineers populated this information, and the business stakeholders reviewed it.

Operational Impact

The implementation of the data catalog has proven beneficial for Snapcommerce. The tool has enabled self-serve solutioning as they had hoped. While business users mostly leverage the glossary, the data team benefits from knowledge sharing across business domains and lines of business. Shared metrics are tagged and tables are easily queried by leveraging the lineage and column definitions provided in the tool. This has made it possible to understand and query a table in their database without needing to make the data model or speak to its owner. Having all documentation about their database in one location has made finding terminology easy. Although the setup required substantial effort, the company was prepared for it and recognized that implementing a data catalog further down-the-line would take even more time. The decision to start cataloging early has paid off as the company scales and its data assets grow.