We've got some great updates for you today, from improvements to your most used features to flexibility upgrades and quality of life fixes.
I really encourage you to jump into the product and check out the new Data Browser. It's hard to represent in just a few words and tiny images how flexible and powerful it feels to use. I'd love to hear what you think!
🔎 New data browser
Searching and discovering data in connected data sources just got way better. Our all-new Data Browser is faster, prettier, and more useful than ever before.
Search is improved, schemas and tables unroll in one tree view, and you can pin your favorite databases and schemas— we hope you love it as much as our data team.
To tell you all about that, here’s Amanda, one of our Analytics Engineers, showing you how she uses the data browser:
For more information, check out the docs— or jump right into Hex and try it out!
⌛ Flexible scheduling
Scheduled runs can now be configured to run on custom cron schedules. What the heck’s a custom cron schedule? Cron strings are a shorthand for specifying complex date and time intervals; Say you want to run an app every three days, at 6:05am and at 6:05pm. Cron represents this as 6 5,18 */3 * *.
Now you can use this syntax in your Hex schedules to sync up app runs with warehouse updates, morning syncs, or anything else— say, at 08:04 AM, between day 15 and 16 of the month, and on Thursday and Tuesday, February through March.
Don't speak cron? Me neither. crontab.guru is a great website for constructing complex cron strings, and the Hex scheduler translates to plain English to make sure you know exactly what you’re deploying.
📈 Trending projects
The Projects homepage can now be sorted by recent project views, so you can quickly get a sense of what apps are popular lately in your workspace. The timeframe for view counting is configurable, so you can toggle between all-time classics and up-and-coming stars.
🟢 Hex status page
Hex has a new status page that sits separate from our production infrastructure, so you can always stay up to date with any incidents affecting Hex.
We work hard every day to make sure you don't need to use it, but you can always find it at https://hex.tech/status.
⚠️ Dataframe SQL upgrade
Dataframe SQL cells are getting an upgrade! DuckDB, the backing query engine, has a new version with extended support for both Decimal type columns and columns with timezone-aware timestamps. We will be making this upgrade on November 10, 2022.
Once upgraded, decimal columns will no longer be cast as strings in order to preserve precision. Instead, you’ll now have the option to use the same “Infer numeric type” option as in Database SQL cells (more about this feature here). We expect this change to impact a very small number of projects. To avoid any loss of precision, turn off the “infer numeric datatypes” option on your Dataframe SQL cells. Additionally, projects which rely on Dataframe SQL cells returning Decimals columns as a string type for downstream analysis will need to be updated to instead accept numeric types. If you have question about the impact of this change to your projects reach out to [support](mailto: [email protected]) for more assistance.
Other improvements
- Postgres data connections can now be configured with both cert-based authentication and user/password authentication.
- We’ve greatly improved Redshift writeback speeds, which were nothing to write home about before. In a test on a 4,000 row table, execution time dropped by *****31x*****.
- Dark mode automatically turns on based on your computer’s system preference. You can still choose always-dark or always-light
- Map cells can now be resized vertically