Business context

Most analysts trying to find answers to business questions aren’t searching for tables and columns directly. What they are actually looking for is contextual information that accelerates time to business impact for data. data.world Concept Cards will change the way data consumers access data by providing a unique search experience no other catalog provider does or can do without the backing of a knowledge graph.

Capabilities

Concept Cards are a feature on data.world’s near-term roadmap to help users discover related people, resources, and other supporting information we can obtain from the knowledge graph about a given search topic. If there are suggested actions that can be taken for the topic itself or for related resources, access to those actions is surfaced directly in the search results.

These cards become a jumping off point to browse and discover new things on the platform that share something in common with the search topic of interest. We see these Concept Cards as the first of many intelligent recommendations we can make by harnessing the power of the knowledge graph.

The data.world public API supports several options for programmatically making updates to resources on the platform. PATCH is a method for making partial updates to individual records, such as adding tags, changing a description, or modifying a title.

In the next two weeks, we will be making a change to the way PATCH endpoints modify list values. We outline these changes below.

Existing Merge Behavior

Lists are merged with existing values on PATCH requests

1. A dataset has tags: [tag A , tag B] 
2. A PATCH request is sent to /datasets/democorp/my-example-dataset with body: { "tags": [ "tag C", "tag D" ]  }
3. The dataset is updated to reflect tags: [ tag A, tag B, tag C ,tag D]
4. A PATCH request is sent to /datasets/democorp/my-example-dataset with payload: { "tags": []  }
5. No change is applied and the tags remain: [ tag A, tag B, tag C ,tag D]

New Replace Behavior

Lists replace existing values on PATCH requests

1. A dataset has tags: [tag A , tag B] 
2. A PATCH request is sent to /datasets/democorp/my-example-dataset with body: { "tags": [ "tag C", "tag D" ]  }
3. The dataset is now updated to have tags: [ tag C ,tag D].  tag A and tag B have been removed.
4. I send a PATCH request to /datasets/democorp/my-example-dataset with body: { "tags": []  }
5. The dataset has been updated to remove all tags.

Why we are making this change

Today, PATCH can be used to add, modify, or remove fields for all non-list values. With the current merge logic, items can only be appended to list values using PATCH. As a consequence, if you want to remove or reorder the items in a list, you must use the PUT method, which does not support partial updates and requires a full overwrite of the existing record. The new logic to overwrite list values will allow users to make partial updates to records that remove or modify the order of items in the list without needing to modify the entire record.

This new logic primarily impacts tags, file labels, collections, and multi-select custom metadata fields.

For enterprise customers, updated metrics have been released today to your Usage and Governance Reporting (ddw-metrics-*) dataset to address some minor bugs and performance improvements.

Potential observable changes:

• For both single-tenant and multi-tenant customers, some reports were not reflecting de-provisioned user accounts. With this fix, multi-tenant customers may find a slight increase in counts in Visits - Return Visitors - Daily, Visits - Return Visitor Days, Visits - Unique Visitor Days and Visits - Unique Visitors - Monthly now properly reflecting de-provisioned user accounts in addition to active user accounts. Single-tenant customers may find a slight increase in Visits - Unique Visitors Daily and Visits - Unique Visitor Days.
• For multi-tenant customers, under certain circumstances some reports could duplicate-count users that were members of multiple sub-organizations. With this fix, you may find a slight decrease in counts in Membership - By Date, Visits - Adoption Daily and Visits - Avg Visits Weekly.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know at support@data.world or via your customer success representative.

In August, we plan to release a series of improvements to our search page including: 

• Category tabs to replace the result type dropdown
• Collapsible filter groups for the left sidebar
• A new discovery-driven All Results Page to highlight a more comprehensive set of result types for broad searches
• A new Advanced Search Builder utility for more complex searches that take advantage of boolean operators and our advanced search syntax

We're investing in navigation enhancements across the site for community and enterprise users. This week, we plan to roll out a beta breadcrumbs feature to help you get back to your list views from your resource pages. This first beta release will include easy access to your organization page from metadata catalog resources, quick filters to navigate back to similar items in your catalog, and basic hierarchical navigation for things like tables and columns. Additional hierarchical navigation support is planned for the coming months.

Next week, we will be releasing an update to the Search UI to include a new standard filter for Resource Type. This has been a much requested filter option to help users drill down into the specific resource types returned from search. This filter includes our common types like datasets, projects, and queries as well as custom types that are configured for your organization's catalog.

This change will also update the presentation order of the search filters as:
1. Resource Type
2. Owner
3. Status
4. Tag
5. Collection
6... Custom configured facets

On Thursday, June 10, we will be deploying a major update to data.world Enterprise Data Catalog customer Usage and Governance Reporting, which is delivered to the ddw-metrics-* dataset in your catalog.

These changes have focused on performance optimizations, increased consistency, some additional columns, and some new tables/reports. Some columns have been renamed to order to achieve consistent use and definitions.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know at support@data.world or via your customer success representative.

Multi-tenant change log

Single-tenant change log (private sites & private installs)

Our metadata collector (dwcc, aka the data.world Catalog Collector) is now available on DockerHub! Simply run docker pull datadotworld/dwcc:x.xx where x.xx is your desired version, and you're in business. It's that easy.

Other enhancements to the metadata collector:

• Updated Domo collector to improve relationship modeling
• Various Tableau & Manta collector fixes & enhancements
• Denodo metadata collector support shifted to Denodo 8
• --config-file option for metadata collector (Beta): We've heard your feedback on wanting a simplified way to manage the configurations for your metadata collectors. The config file will become the default way in the near future to set your parameters going forward. Lots more info on this coming soon! 

In the last few weeks, several minor bugs and enhancements have been made. Here are some notable ones:

Improved help text for tags, including on pressing “Enter” to add tags

Improved empty state messaging for adding contributors to a dataset

Consistent use of timestamps in alerts and notifications

Navigation tabs on various pages are now keyboard-navigable (left and right arrow keys) for ease of browsing and improved accessibility

“Share” button directly opens “Grant access” modal

Consistent use of display name in emails

Text truncation fixed for filter bars and the project workbench

Various layout, text, and navigational misalignments or inconsistencies

🚨 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.