Changelog

Hex projects now have a fully reactive, DAG-based recompute model, which only re-executes cells as required based on upstream changes.

To enable this, all you have to do is set your Run Mode to Auto. Now whenever you update a parameter or a cell, Hex will analyze the code and re-run other cells as needed. If you ever want to go back to one-cell-at-a-time, you can easily toggle to Cell Only from the top bar.

Auto Run is a massive improvement for reproducibility, interpretability, and performance, both in Notebook and App views.

🕸️ The Graph​

Hit the Graph button in the upper right to open an interactive DAG visualization of your project. All cells with variable relationships are automatically displayed, with their dependencies easily charted:

This lets you rapidly understand even a very complex project, visually exploring the flow of data and variables in a way that simply isn't possible from a typical notebook view.

Visualization options can be found in the 👁️ icon in the upper right.

👋 $o long to $, Hello New UI ✨​

With the magic of Auto Run, we have also eliminated the $. Hex input parameters now return plain variable names e.g., input_1.

You can also see the variables returned by any cell in the new UI:

We've also refreshed the Notebook view UI to make it easier to understand what variables are being returned by each cell.

You can also hover on any returned variable to see metadata about it and discover where it's referenced in the project. This works really nicely with the graph!

🛋️ Multi-select cells​

Sometime you just need to move a block of cells, duplicate them, or copy them to a different section of your project. We've added the ability to select multiple cells (shift + arrow) and adjust them as needed, all from the comfort of your keyboard!

📝 Dynamic markdown​

One of the top request features has arrived: Dynamic Markdown! You can now use variables directly in markdown cells!

You may also notice that the formatting has gotten a glow up. Header fonts are bigger, there are more header options, and fonts are now consistent between Notebook and App views.

🔢 Cell line numbers​

We know some of you have some meaty queries and code cells (definitely not looking at you, you thousand-line-query-writers!). We've added cell line numbers to make navigating those beasts a little easier.

Bugs squashed​

• When setting up a new BigQuery connection, schema fetching is now much faster and won't time out.
• We fixed an issue with Button Input parameters that caused them to appear to be always running.
• If you were very quick on the draw and managed to click "Restore" twice on the same historical Hex version, you could have gotten into a weird state. No more!
• We've added a tooltip to display long project names on both the project homepage and in Notebook view.

Maybe not glamorous, but security is fundamental to how we are building Hex. We're excited to announce that we now have a SOC2 Type II report!

The tl;dr — we take security seriously, so much so that an external auditor agrees that our systems and processes are secure, and that we adhere to them in practice. Read more details on our blog.

Yep, we went there. You can now select "Dataframes" as a data source for SQL cells, and query any dataframe in a project like a table in a database. Queries are fast, in-memory, and use a well-featured flavor of PostgreSQL.

You can use Dataframe SQL to break up large queries into modules that are "chained" together, join tables across databases and CSV sources, or just pop back into SQL halfway through an analysis to do a simple filter or case statement. You can mix and match SQL and Python on the same data as many times as you'd like!

There's a lot to say about this one, so we wrote an entire blog post with the "why" behind the feature. Just in the mood to get started? Check out the docs for the full details and jump right in.

🚦Project organization​

Bring some order to the chaos and organize all of your Hex projects! You can now add a Status and multiple Categories to any Hex project and filter the main Projects view to quickly find what you're looking for.

We've set you up with some default options to get you started, but any Hex administrator can add new Categories or Statuses from the Administration page. And yes, you can remove the defaults if you've got your own big plans 🙂.

🖥️ View Live button​

We saw that you generally only clicked the 👁️ button in the menubar to access the "View Live" button contained within, so we pulled that button out to the top level. You can now click this 🖥️ button to go straight to the live version of your app.

🕵️‍♀️ SQL Query metadata​

To help admins keep track of database usage, SQL queries now include a comment with helpful metadata about the Hex user and project that ran the query.

📊 Binning in Chart cells​

Chart cells now support binning, which means you can create histograms right out of the box!

🕴 Performance improvements​

We have made some big improvements to speed in Hex: loading projects is much snappier, project run times are faster, and little things like adding new cells take less time. Performance work is never done – let us know if there are any other areas that you think could use a little speed up 🚀