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Entities

Learn about entities in Profiles.

  •   2 minute read  

This guide introduces you to the concept of entities in Profiles and shows how to define entities in your Profiles project.

Overview

Every business has artifacts that are tracked across systems for creating a complete data picture of that artifact. In Profiles, these are called Entities.

Entities can be as common as users, accounts, etc. It can also expand to be anything that you can track across systems and want a complete picture of, like campaigns, devices, or even month of the year.

Entities are the central concept that a Profiles project is built around. It is where you define what your identity graphs and C360 tables are built around.

SQL Keyword: GROUP BY

Requirements

  • An entity must have multiple IDs in the data sources, also called as inputs.
  • Each input must have at least one ID that is shared with another input.
  • No ID can be shared across any member of an entity (that is, an ID cannot shared by multiple users).

Usage

You can useentities in the pb_project.yaml file present in the top level of every Profiles project, as shown:

name: profiles_project
schema_version: 84
connection: wh_connection_dev
model_folders:
  - models
##########################################
entities:
  - name: user
    id_stitcher: models/user_id_stitcher
    id_types:
      - user_id
      - anonymous_id
    feature_views:                # Optional
      using_ids:
        - id: anonymous_id
          name: anonymous_id_360
##########################################
id_types:
  - name: user_id
  - name: anonymous_id
    filters:                      # Optional
      - type: exclude
        value: ""
python_requirements:              # Optional
  - profiles_mlcorelib==0.4.1

Best practices

  • As entities are the central building block of a Profiles project, you should define them before building the rest of the project.
  • Most common entities include user, account, organization, and prospect. But you can define an entity for anything that you want to group and aggregate your data around, including marketing campaigns, business units, or even months of the year (for monthly reporting).
  • When picking id_types, consider the granularity of the entity. At the user grain, you will want to pick unique id_types of the same grain. For higher level grains like organization or account, you can include user level grain id_types as well as org level id_types as long each user only belongs to one org or account.

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