🚨 Default behavior change coming next week 🚨

We have recently discovered that when executing queries, there are some cases where our DATETIME columns contain timezone information, and other cases where they do not. This is primarily an issue that arises with columns containing date/time information in uploaded files (we do not see this with live tables). We have decided to address this inconsistency. Starting next week, query result columns of type DATETIME will no longer contain timezone information, while columns of type DATETIMESTAMP will always contain timezone information.

The impact of this change shouldn’t be significant, and most users will see no change. However, if you have queries across ingested data which aggregate on DATETIME columns, or do DATE_ADD() style calculations, you may notice differences in your results depending on your current timezone.

If you are impacted by this change, here are some ways to clarify your intent w.r.t. timezones:

1. CAST the resulting column to a DATETIMESTAMP to force timezones, or DATETIME to strip timezones (documentation)
2. Use AT_TIME_ZONE() to explicitly state your timezone (documentation)
3. Ensure that the table column type is set to be of type DATETIMESTAMP or DATETIME (documentation)

Note: If timezone information is desired, but not defined, UTC is assumed. 

Please contact support@data.world with any questions or concerns. As always, we’re happy to help.

data.world is very excited to announce our new deep brain integration.

Now data consumers simply need to think about what data they want, and data.world will return governed, curated data. It also supports cataloging of business terminology straight from subject matter experts.

When we originally envisioned the feature, our design inspiration was to provide an "easy button." However Jon Loyens, co-founder and CPO, famously then said "what if there was no button at all?"

A future release will support agile data governance workflows, such as data access approvals. Integration is quick and relatively painless, though upgrades require a bit of effort and minor outpatient surgery.

Tags now support ampersands, apostrophes, and periods 🎉  

Search is a core feature of data.world and is consistently a focus of our improvement efforts. This month, we've rolled out improvements to result rankings on searches that contain more than one word. This improvement provides better rankings for results with titles that exactly match the submitted search as well as several other ranking and relevance improvements. These changes also provide better support for searches that contain special characters such as ampersands, dashes, underscores, and slashes.

Head over the Gra.fo API Documentation to learn more about how to use the Gra.fo public API to export your model as TTL or OWL. The export API is designed for use with build scripts, version control tools, integrations, or to upload your model into other tools, like data.world.

Fun fact: Ever wonder why our adorable mascot, Sparkle, is an OWL? Now you know!

Looking for the API Documentation? We've added a link to the user menu in Gra.fo:

Gra.fo supports several additional export formats from the document page. These options can be found under the File menu.

Connection Manager now supports collection of metadata from the platform user interface, enabling a faster, more consolidated way to catalog your data. We currently support collecting metadata from a number of different database sources, and we will be expanding the list of supported sources over the coming months.

View metadata task documentation

Here is a roundup of some of the key features we released last month, February 2021 -- Looker metadata support, custom metadata field default edit behavior improvements, Gra.fo enhancements, and dataset sync webhook notifications.

We're proud to announce a new metadata collector is now available for enterprise customer use -- Presto (distributed SQL query engine). Presto is a popular way to query data across a variety of different data sources with a single, optimized interface. Metadata collected includes database, schema, table, view, and column information.

Check out recent UX improvements to Gra.fo, our visual knowledge graph modeling tool. 

1. To quickly zoom out to see the full graph, use the keyboard shortcut:
   OPTION (ALT) + SHIFT + 0
2. To zoom to a specific concept:
   OPTION (ALT) + SHIFT + click concept
3. You can now deeplink directly to a concept in the graph using the Copy link to concept option in the concept menu. Watch the video to see how we use this feature to move fluidly between a data.world catalog and Gra.fo.

Gra.fo is a companion product to data.world with a 30 day free trial of premium team features. Visit Gra.fo to learn more, or reach out to help@data.world.

We're proud to announce a new metadata collector is now available for enterprise customer use in private beta -- Looker (business intelligence). Let us know if you'd like to get your hands on the early version of this collector.

As we get closer to general availability, we'll be releasing more information on these exciting expanded metadata and discovery capabilities!