Changelog

Get ready for next month's official Spring Launch on May 29— we have some amazing things coming down the line, so stay tuned! The week after that, I’ll be hosting a hands-on demo of all the new features that you can sign up for now.

🕵️‍♂️ Audit logs​

There is no Pepe Silvia. The man does not exist, okay?
— Charlie Kelly

Enterprise customers can now access a complete event log of their Hex workspace, detailing every breadcrumb from user role edits to project and data access.

If you’re interested in reviewing this kind of data, chances are you’ve already got a conspiracy wall SIEM tool to centralize and analyze all your logs. This feature gives you access to raw log exports that we can pipe right into the log analysis tool of your choice!

This feature is available to workspaces on our Enterprise plan. Please reach out to your Hex point of contact for more information.

📤 Expanded Git support​

Git project export and package import now supports Bitbucket and GitHub Enterprise. Components can now be exported to Git.

We’ve also improved a lot of behind-the-scenes action here to avoid sticky Git situations and generally streamline export flows. Git export already worked for GitLab and GitHub, and that hasn’t changed.

Why use Git export? Now that Reviews provide a first-class approval workflow entirely inside Hex (check them out if you haven’t yet!), Git export is primarily useful for maintaining an audit log of changes to projects. If you enable it on a project, you’ll be able to see line-by-line diffs of every saved and published version of that project as commits in the repo of your choice.

Pro tip: Combining Git export with workspace audit logs gives enterprise customers a detailed audit record of every change made in a workspace, from access and configuration to actual code changes.

Git export is available to workspaces on the Team plan or higher. GitHub Enterprise is only available to workspaces on the Enterprise plan.

🗃️ ListProjects API endpoint​

You can now list projects from the API.

This endpoint lists projects. But wait! It also returns a ton of project metadata like status and categories, so you can easily queue up custom runs of multiple projects based on metadata filters, without having to make a bunch of calls to GetProject.

Learn more in the interactive API documentation.

This endpoint is in beta. We’d love to hear your feedback and how we can make it (and the entire Hex API) more useful for your project execution needs.

💫 Magic chart performance​

Magic now generates charts up to 10x faster. This clip is not sped up or cached:

Magic lets you use AI to generate queries, code, and visualizations faster than you ever could by hand.

Except… the visualizations weren’t always faster than you could do by hand. It depends how fast you click, but we clocked new chart generations at ~10 seconds in our tests— way too slow.

Now, AI chart generation should only around 1 second! Right now this boost is only for new charts, but we’re working on bringing this to edits too.

Pro tip: When you use Magic in Generate mode, it automatically decides whether or not you want a chart based on your prompt. Try saying "build me a chart of x" or "query data about users and then visualize it as a 100% column chart"

Other improvements​

• NaNs and nulls are now visually quieter than other values in tables, making them easier to skim.
• We fixed issues with browser performance when resizing a Hex window containing many charts.
• We’ve upgraded our emoji support to unicode 15, so you can use the 🫎, 🫠, and other important new emojis in comments and text cells.
• Comments also now support rich text, like code blocks and bold font.
• We fixed a bug that could prevent projects being removed from collections.

✔️ Reviews​

Reviews are a new way to (you guessed it) review work in Hex! You can make reviews required to publish changes for certain projects, or just ask for a review anytime you want a second pair of eyes.

Peer reviews are the best way to keep business-critical reports from breaking, avoid accidental data mishaps, and build institutional knowledge on your data team. But analytics tools were never really built for it, and though some teams have found success in git-based workflows, it’s always a hassle to review work out-of-context— especially complex visual reports with lots of charts.

Reviews bring the full code review workflow right into Hex, making it delightful to review even your most complex data projects.

A rich diff view lets you easily see the code, config, and data changes to every cell in the notebook, and integrated app previews mean you can click-test everything without switching contexts.

Reviews also ship with overall updates to the publishing workflow: an improved diff view, overall polish, and… drumroll please… notebook editors can now instantly compare their current draft to the published version 😎.

Reviews are available for workspaces on our Team & Enterprise plans. Learn more in the docs.

👁️ Data Browser Improvements​

The Data Browser now features full table previews, new ‘Recently Used’ and ‘Favorites’ tabs, and a full-screen view. We’ve also added more ways to access it in addition to the sidebar: from the ‘Add cell’ bar as well as the blank state of new projects.

We saw that everyone, including our own data team, started every analysis by running a couple select * from table limit 100; queries to get the lay of the land.

Table previews in the Data Browser replace that clunky workflow! You’ll find your most commonly referenced tables in the Recently Used or Favorites tab, with an instantly available 100-row preview right alongside metadata from dbt and the Data Manager.

One more click, and you can add a SQL cell with a pre-filled query to your notebook.

PS: We used to call this the “Schema Browser”. Did you ever wonder why we changed it to “Data Browser”? Now you know— because we were planning to put actual data in it!

📈 Chart Cornucopia​

We want building charts in Hex to be the best visualization experience you’ve had since your last ayahuasca retreat. To that end, we’ve been investing a lot in both new features and careful polish to our chart cells— like the “Chart fixes galore” release from a few weeks ago, or the recent Facets release.

This round of updates includes some really impactful additions, and there’s way more where they came from. So if there’s something nagging at you that would make charts in Hex more useful for you, please let us know, and we'll get on it!

Total labels

You can now add total labels to stacked bar/column charts that sum up the entire bar. This is best used in tandem with a group / color by field, so you can view two levels of aggregation in one visualization.

This was actually our second most popular feature feature request! Pro tip: If you use this in combination with manual tooltips, you’ll be able to view even more distinct levels of aggregation in one visualization.

Continuous color improvements We’ve made improvements to continuous color scales, from the color swatch / pane selector to improved scaling and bounds.

Just like facets, continuous color scales can be surprisingly useful for visualizing an entire new dimension of your data that’s otherwise difficult to get a sense of.

In this example, I’m using a continuous color scale on total order revenue to highlight an interesting seasonal revenue trend that doesn’t seem to correlate with order count. That seems worth digging into further…

Independent y-axes for facets

You can now detach the y-axes of facet charts to allow each individual subplot to have its own auto-sized y-axis. This can be a valuable tool for comparing distributions, but please use this carefully to avoid chart crimes!

This email has run out of megabytes for images, so you’ll have to imagine this one. It looks spectacular, though.

Config overwriting polish

Previously, you might have find yourself a bit peeved when changing a field selection in one part of the chart config resulted in you losing your settings in another part of the config. We’ve improved the way that defaults are handled to prevent them from ever stepping on your toes and overwriting your choices.

And more…

We've improved log scale bounds-handling, improved the stability of facets and fixed error messages when that fails, improved various warning messages, and cleaned up selection menus.

Other improvements​

• Shared drives are now supported in the Google Drive external file integration.
• We’ve made some updates to the new homepage view, improving the visual layout of Recently Viewed cards in particular.
• We fixed a bug that prevented using jinja to parameterize a filter on a pivot cell. Did you know you could do that?! I sure didn’t. Well, I guess you couldn’t. But you were supposed to. And now you can.

Today we’re making some updates to our Magic AI assistant that make it more powerful, intuitive, and faster 🤖.

The first version of Magic has been available for almost a year now, and we’re excited about how useful it’s been for our users. Thousands of people each week are using these features to get more done with data: editing complex SQL queries, debugging confusing Python code, and speeding up the most tedious parts of their jobs (cough pandas cough regex).

This round of updates makes these AI tools even more accurate, updates and polishes their UX, and introduces some powerful new functionality. Check out the blog for more (and higher quality) demos, watch this 3 minute video summary, or read on for the quick notes!

➕ Generate mode​

Magic can now generate multiple cells at a time in your notebook, chaining together SQL, Python, and Chart cells to answer complex questions or kickstart a new analysis.

It’s easy to invoke this from anywhere: just hit Cmd+G, use ↓ from an edit mode prompt bar, or click the “Add with Magic” button between cells.

New cells are all created as drafts, so you can inspect, edit, and validate AI generated code before accepting it. Once accepted, the new cells seamlessly integrate into your notebook.

💬 More powerful, streamlined prompting​

To support new cell generation and more complex instructions, we’ve rebuilt the prompt bar, unifying all Magic actions into one simple interface.

You can activate Magic on a cell with Cmd+Shift+M, and seamlessly switch between editing existing cells or generating new cells with the ↑ and ↓ keys.

The new design also supports more complex multi-line instructions and gives more flexibility to auto-fixes, letting you provide specific instructions instead of relying on Magic to guess what kind of fix you'd like to make.

🎯 Mentioning data​

The prompt bar now supports "@ mentioning" datasets to specify what resources it should use.

In any prompt bar, you can hit @ and then keep typing to search for resources.

This is a simple addition, with a huge impact on prompting efficiency and accuracy. Use this to point at a specific database table (handy if you're off-roading and using some unusual, undocumented resources) or if you're in a complex project, to direct Hex towards a particular dataframe.

🤓 Accuracy and context​

In addition to these big changes, we’ve also been putting in lots of work on our state-of-the-art retrieval pipelines, and seen steady improvement in Hex’s ability to accurately generate SQL queries. But it’s important to note that no matter how good our engineering is, your context is critical! The more metadata you can provide about your tables and columns, the better Hex can effectively prompt the model and maximize completion quality.

You can do this in three main ways:

• dbt Docs: if you’re using dbt Cloud, all you have to do is update the metadata in your models, and it’ll automatically flow into Hex and be used to help inform query generation.
• Support for warehouse metadata: ditto if you update information about your columns and tables in Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift.
• via Hex’s built-in Data Manager, which lets you add and edit metadata, as well as promote and exclude schemas and tables.

Alright, that's what's hot off the presses! I can't wait to hear your feedback on these updates, and to see what you build with a little help from Magic 🧙.

🏡 New homepage​

We’ve rebuilt the Hex homepage to make finding important and frequently accessed projects easy.

An early beta user put it best: “all the stuff I wanted to access easier is now easier to access”. Mission accomplished 🫡.

The new homepage has 5 sections. Watch this quick loom tour, or read about them below:

• Jump back in aka recently viewed projects. This is basically what the entire old homepage was.
• Popular projects this week. This is across your entire workspace, so you can easily find the most important Hex apps for your company. This is my new favorite section.
• Collections with new additions. Any collection that has a new project in it will show up here.
• Recently published. This is a “news feed” of recently published projects from your workspace.
• The Sidebar. We’ve moved Favorites to the sidebar, for both Projects and Collections. They’re easier to access, and out of the way of all the other sections.

You’ll also notice that each project in these sections displays a lot more metadata! Often a title isn’t enough to know if this is the thing you’re looking for. How many views does it have? Are they recent views? When was it published? Who made it?

These are all questions that the new project cards answer at a glance:

There’s a ton of careful thought that went into this redesign, and it’s an extensible framework we’re going to continue building and iterating on. Read more about the updates in the blog!

🗣️ Project @ mentions​

You can now @ mention projects from comments and text cells.

This is a small but mighty feature that enables all kinds of useful organizational patterns. We are already using it internally to create some cross-linking between our core company metrics apps, and it’s a delightful experience to reference a project right in a comment.

📊 Chart fixes galore!​

And I mean galore. Here’s a sample of them, which is limited only because my cmd+c & cmd+v fingers were getting tired.

• You can now filter on x-axes that have dots in column names
• Line charts can be grouped by double-quoted column names
• Visual filtering now works when there are brackets in column names
• Charts now show correct dates when column names contained dots
• Tooltips no longer display NaN if a column name contains dots
• Line charts with odd characters in column names now work
• A large and diverse variety of manual tooltip related issues have been fixed
• Color attributes now appear in tooltips even if they’re used in aggregations
• Tooltips render properly when there are 2 series based on the same column
• Tooltips should not fall back to UNIX timestamps when you show a non-axis column
• Manual tooltips now support aggregated columns for double-pivoted-dual-axis charts.
• Custom ordering of legend items now works as expected
• Much, much more.

Charts have a lot of surface area! There’s so many config combinations, and input data can be incredibly complex.

We’re hard at work expanding chart functionality (check out facets if you haven’t yet!), but we’re equally devoted to making sure that basic chart functionality is… functional, no matter what data or chart config you throw at it.

Other improvements​

• Download as PDF now respects your current theme in the download.
• If you’ve ever noticed strange duplicated outputs in a Hex project that went away upon refresh— congratulations! You saw a ghost that has now been captured, disciplined, and banished back to the astral plane. You will never see it again.

Fresh round of Hex features plummeting towards you at relativistic speeds. (wait, does that mean they’re coming really fast, or slow? I guess it depends on your frame of reference… 😎)

💎 Trellis charts​

Chart cells now support faceting, so you can build beautiful, information-dense trellis charts with just a few clicks.

You might know these as trellis charts, small multiples, faceted charts, lattice charts, or just “that thing where the viz is split into a bunch of plots”. Whatever you call them, the premise is pretty simple: Choose a column to "facet" by, and your plot becomes a grid of subplots, broken out by that column.

This lets you display a lot more information without compromising— and often actually enhancing— the readability of a visualization. Done right, you can display 4 (or even 5, if you want to get really loco) dimensions of data at once.

Here's a really quick example of improving a cluttered, confusing viz by turning it into a trellis chart. The initial state here makes it really tough to notice any year-over-year patterns in item sales:

Breaking it out as a trellis chart faceted by year, it's immediately obvious that there's a crazy spike in two specific menu items in 2022. The entire chart is more readable, but the patterns in particular really leap out:

Sold yet? No? Trellis charts are really easy to configure too! Here's a 9 second gif of me going from screenshot 1 to screenshot 2 there, in real time. I count only 5 clicks!

And if you're still hungry for EVEN MORE trellis chart content... Here's a 3 minute video of me walking through the thought process behind that 9 second gif, which of course itself is an elongation of those two screenshots:

🗃️ Google Drive integration​

Access Google Drive files directly from Hex, just like a locally uploaded file.

Once a Google Drive connection is configured in Workspace Assets settings, you’ll be able to browse and import files right from the Files sidebar of any Hex project.

You’re also able to natively write files to GDrive without any configuration or manual upload. Using a standard file.write() or dataframe.to_csv() with an external-files/googledrive/<your_drive>/<your_filename.csv> path will just work.

An important note: Because this is a workspace level connection, it's not possible to connect to a user's entire "My Drive". Instead, a Subdirectory ID is required to connect to a specific folder in Drive. To find your Subdirectory ID, navigate to the directory in Google Drive, and copy the ID after folders/ in the URL.

See the docs for more.

🩺 Magic for PHI ​

HIPAA compliant customers of Hex can now make full use of our Magic AI features.

Hex’s Magic AI (Artifical Intelligence) features are powered by OpenAI, who we now have a BAA (Business Associate Agreement) in place with that allows them to process PHI (Protected Health Information) data for our customers.

This means customers of Hex that must maintain HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance are now able to use Magic!

Workspace admins can enable Magic and configure the Data Manager from the Workspace Settings > Magic page. For more about our commitments to data privacy and security, visit trust.hex.tech.

Other improvements​

• We’ve added some handy new keyboard shortcuts to make working in large projects easier. Go try these right now so you bake in the muscle memory! I promise they will make you faster at using Hex.
  • Option + ⬆︎ and Option + ⬇︎: Jump to the top / bottom of the notebook
  • Cmd + [ and Cmd + ]: Step forward / backward through cells in the order you most recently edited them.
  • You can also access these from the command palette (Cmd + P)
• The Bigquery DataFrames (bigframes) package is now installed by default, and users of BigQuery can create a new BigFrames session using hextoolkit. Stay tuned for more here 😉.