Case study: How Domain democratised its data

The digital real estate marketplace Domain was growing at a rapid rate and needed to find a way to democratise its data. 

Pooyan Asgari, chief data officer at Domain explained the journey the company took to better scale its data throughout the whole organisation.

He said as Domain was growing at a rapid rate, it created a new data-based challenge for the real estate brand. 

The technology Domain used six years ago would act as a bottleneck towards scale patterns they had in mind, which Asgari said led them to implement Snowflake.

“The key challenge we were facing at the time was how can we open up the data and democratise across the business without having a bigger central data team,” Asgari said. 

As a company with a growing headcount, Asgari said Domain needed a bigger central data functionality with more staff.

“We knew that growing with that pace in a central team would have a negative impact in the agility and the scalability of the team,” he said.

Using Snowflake since 2018, Asgari said it has created a slew of new use cases for the real estate platform.

One of them was using the visualisation tool Tableau and connecting it to the master datasets, not the summarised datasets.

“Connecting the Tableau dashboard to a massive dataset because of the computing power Snowflake provides enables the end user to edit and adjust the very same dashboard or finalised solution on top of the master data set,” he said.

“That gives a massive flexibility around customisation of some of these final insight tools that we are delivering.”

Asgarai explained Domain is also able to migrate some of its code-based solutions directly into Snowflake. This means they are able to update the location boundaries of suburbs and properties in an instant.

“It used to be weeks of processing every month to refresh our central data assets when changes in the new properties come up to the market and or if a land boundary changes or suburb boundary," he said.

“Now, it's a matter of hours because it is all being done inside Snowflake, because we have infinite scalability. Not only is it faster by order of magnitude, it is a few more services less to maintain and manage.”