A backfill is a one-time load of historical data into a platform so that profiles, segments and models start with history instead of an empty slate. Without it, a new CDP sees every customer as new, lifetime value starts at zero and a churn model has nothing to learn from.
Category
Data Architecture
Also known as
historical load; historical data load
In practice
Decide the cutoff before the load and make the backfilled events match the live event schema exactly. A backfill in a different format creates a second version of every event that reports have to reconcile forever.
Related
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