DockerHub and metadata collector enhancement roundup

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! 

Bug roundup 🐞

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

General Release: Column Search

We are thrilled to announce the public release of a highly requested feature: Column Search. The main search page now provides result details that match against columns in your data.world datasets and projects as well as column metadata in your catalog. Look for the new column results banner above your search results.

Clicking the banner or selecting "Columns" from the result type dropdown will take you to the column search view. Here you'll find relevant columns that may be good candidates for joining tables with data you already have, or that can help you get a good picture of the granular data included in your catalog.

Column metadata results will link you to the column details page in your catalog and results for columns in your data.world datasets and projects will take you straight to the relevant dataset workspace. Column search is available for enterprise and community users.


Informational Metadata Hovers

Not exactly sure what you are looking for in your catalog or your resources library? Tired of clicking into individual items just to discover it's not what you thought it was? Look for the new information icon on list views to see additional contextual metadata about the items in the list without leaving your current view.



New APIs: Virtual Connections and Virtual Tables

data.world not only supports metadata collection, but can also power federated queries of data sources such as Snowflake, BigQuery, SQL Server, and many others. Now in addition to our UI, you can use our API to manage these virtual connections and tables.

Head over to our API documentation to learn more about configuring virtual connections and adding virtual tables to your datasets with the public API.

Coming Soon: Addressing timezone inconsistency

🚨 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.

New: Groundbreaking "deep brain" integration

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.

Search Improvements: Rankings and Special Characters

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.


March 2021 monthly product update

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.

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