Announcing new data.world Documentation Portal

We're thrilled to announce the release of our brand new documentation portal. We've remastered all our platform documentation content to make it easier to read, search, and navigate. You can now get all the answers you need in just one place!

These are some of the improvements and new navigation experiences you'll see  in our new portal:

- Home page menus

Use the top menus to navigate the documentation for specific product versions: Community docs for data.world community members and Enterprise docs, specifically written for our enterprise customers who have needs and use cases outside of the scope of our community users.

- Search improvements 

Search is one of the most important ways to find the information you need. So we’ve introduced a new search experience. When you enter a query, you’ll immediately see some suggestions. 

- Easier access to everything you need

Easy access to integrations gallery, API docs, and Grafo documentation.

Check it out at https://docs.data.world/.

Coming soon: Resource Type Search Filter

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

Coming soon: Metrics update

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)


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.

Gra.fo: Share document via link

Need some quick feedback on your collaborative modeling project? Want to share your graphical view of the world with your customers or your team?

You can now share your Gra.fo model documents without requiring your audience to have a Gra.fo account or an individual invitation. Use the "Get link" option of the share menu to grant read-only access to your document to anyone you've shared the link with. 



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.

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