Creating datasets

Datasets are the primary artifact in the Analytics data model. They are logical views in Analytics that map to tables or views in your data warehouse and represent Event and Actor data.

Event data​

Event data comprises events from internal data collection, third-party customer data platforms, marketing sources, customer care sources, and so on. They represent an action or fact that took place at a point in time. Actors represent the entity in your product ecosystem that initiated the event, typically users, but this can also include accounts, vendors, service providers, and so on.

Actor data​

Actor datasets are typically mapped into Analytics one-to-one from existing source tables or views in the warehouse. They take the form of dimension tables, where each row represents a single, unique actor, such as a user, with a primary key or Universal Unique Identifier (UUID). Columns represent attributes that describe the entity associated with that ID. You do not need any special semantic rules to create an actor dataset.

In Analytics, there are four types of datasets:

• Source dataset
• Derived dataset
• Union dataset
• Column actors dataset