One of the most powerful features of the data.world catalog is the ability to enrich your catalog resources with custom metadata that's unique to your business.

We are pleased to announce that we've rolled out the first of several improvements to support search matches on custom metadata fields for your catalog resources. 

This improvement expands the fields we match against for free text searches to include any custom metadata fields you have configured in your catalog as text or selection fields. This feature empowers your end users to search for resources by the terminology and categorizations that mean the most to your business.

In the example above, verified by and data steward are custom metadata fields defined in our catalog for tables. A search for sarah smart now yields matches where she is listed as the data steward or the person who has verified the data, in addition to any existing matching fields like owner.

Tip: You can perform more precise searches against custom metadata fields with our advanced search syntax. In the example above, a search for metadata:"data steward:sarah smart" will return filtered results where Sarah Smart is listed as the Data Steward. 

Look for upcoming releases to further support boolean and IRI-based metadata searches.

🚨 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.

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.

Status indicators, which include helpful tooltip hints when you hover, are available in many parts of the application such as search and the newsfeed. They provide quick, at-a-glance visibility of the quality, certification, or governance status around data or analysis resources. They are now also available on organization profile pages as well.

For enterprise customers, the following updated metrics have been released to your Usage and Governance Reporting (ddw-metrics-*) dataset. This was noted as coming soon here.

Events - Pageviews - Last 90 Days: This table now includes all types of pageviews, whereas previously it was filtered to only include dataset and project views. In addition, the window has been extended from 30 to 90 days.

Events - Queries: This new table is a detailed audit of query events. This was previously already available for multi-tenant customers. Going forward, it will also be available for single-tenant or virtual private customers. More details are included in the data dictionary markdown file. 

Resources - Datasets: This table contains a new column called “notificationsEmail” which includes any additional email address associated with the notifications for the dataset, as set in the dataset settings.

Visits - New Users By Month: This table logic has been updated to be consistent with other metrics, namely Visits - Unique Visitors To Date and Visits - Unique Visitors - All Time List.