ActionIQ Adds Databricks Delta Sharing: Flexibility and Control in Data Integration

At ActionIQ, we know that marketers need fast, flexible, and secure access to customer data to deliver personalized, real-time engagement. That’s why we are excited to announce a new two-way integration with Databricks’ Delta Sharing, further enhancing the range of integration patterns available to our clients.

Why Integrate ActionIQ with Databricks

As organizations grow, so does the complexity of their data landscape. Integrating a customer data platform (CDP) like ActionIQ with a robust data platform like Databricks enables businesses to unlock the full potential of their customer data. This integration helps brands manage, activate, and scale their data more efficiently and effectively, delivering several key benefits:

• Reduced Operational Burden: Eliminate the need to copy data between systems, reducing data movement, and simplifying processes for faster execution.
• Centralized Governance & Data Consistency: Maintain unified governance and security by managing all data within a single platform.
• Faster Time to Insights: Empower marketers and non-technical users with ActionIQ’s no-code interface, allowing them to quickly access and activate customer data for faster, more informed decision-making.

With ActionIQ and Databricks, businesses enhance their data management, empowering marketers with faster, deeper insights into customer behaviors and preference. Databricks’ advanced data processing capabilities provide enriched data streams that fuel more accurate customer segmentation, personalization, and omnichannel engagement through ActionIQ—ultimately leading to better customer experiences, higher customer lifetime value (CLTV), and revenue growth.

At the same time, we recognize the importance of flexibility in data integration. No single method satisfies all needs, which is why ActionIQ is thrilled to introduce ActionIQ Delta Sharing, a new integration option for your data stack.

ActionIQ Brings More Choice and Control With Two-Way Delta Sharing Integration

Delta Sharing is an open protocol for secure data sharing, developed by Databricks. The adoption of data-sharing protocols as a method to integrate data directly between systems has been growing in enterprise stacks. Delta Sharing brings brands unparalleled accessibility and scale, with the ability to:

• Share data without copy requirements: Easily make data accessible in Delta Lake or Apache Parquet format.
• Scale efficiently: Share and consume terabytes of datasets reliably without incurring drastic financial implications.
• Increase security: Meet privacy and compliance requirements by granting, tracking, and auditing access from a single point of enforcement.

How Delta Sharing Works

Delta Sharing is a simple REST protocol that securely shares access to parts of a cloud dataset. It leverages modern cloud storage systems such as S3, ADLS, or GCS to reliably transfer large datasets. There are two parties involved: Data Providers and Data Recipients.

Data Providers can share existing tables or specific parts of tables (e.g., specific table versions or partitions) stored in a data lake, in Delta Lake format. A Delta Lake table is essentially a collection of Parquet files.

Data Recipients use an available Delta Sharing connector to access and consume the shared data.

Integrate ActionIQ With Your Data Sources via Delta Sharing

Share the tables stored in your lakehouse (Data Provider) with ActionIQ (Data Recipient), enabling your business team to securely access customer data immediately without the need to build and maintain data pipelines between both systems.

Access ActionIQ’s Data From Your Systems via Delta Sharing

Not only can you provide ActionIQ access to your lakehouse data, allowing your business team to execute customer experience use cases in the CDP, but you can also share ActionIQ’s data the same way.

For any activation run by ActionIQ, the platform generates Contact History tables, which include granular log-level touchpoint metadata related to that activation for each user. Previously, the only option for clients to consume this data was to set up data pipelines, where ActionIQ would generate and export a file to be ingested by the consuming system, such as a data warehouse.

With Delta Sharing, clients can now directly connect and consume the data stored within ActionIQ.

Delta Sharing will soon be available for any data stored in ActionIQ, including tables ingested into the CDP via traditional data pipelines.

Delta Sharing Builds on a Diverse Set of Integration Options for Clients

Delta Sharing is now available as a third source integration pattern option for clients, alongside the traditional data pipeline and query federation. ActionIQ is the first CDP to offer this range of options, giving clients full control over how to make data accessible for the CDP:

• Data Pipeline: Self-service copies of data via batch file transfers. Data is stored in ActionIQ’s CX data store. Compatible with any on-premise, cloud data warehouse, or other data sources.
• Delta Sharing: Prebuilt integration allowing ActionIQ to query data without copying it. Compatible with Databricks.
• Query Federation: Queries are pushed down for execution directly in the data warehouse. Compatible with Databricks, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and Teradata VantageCloud.

These options are not mutually exclusive; clients can combine them based on their preferences and use cases.

Build a Stronger Customer Data Stack with ActionIQ

ActionIQ is an enterprise Composable CDP built to integrate seamlessly within your customer data stack and provide business teams with the tools they need to meet their goals.

Get a demo today to learn how our innovative solutions can transform your business.