🌟 Feature Friday 🌟

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The one that kicks of 2023

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Hello there, and welcome to another glorious Feature friday!

Happy 2023 and 新年好 🐰 ! It's been a bumper start to the year for us at Lightdash after a rejuvenating holiday period.

🙏 To start off 2023, we'd like to thank our Slack Community, which is growing strong at over 600 people. It's great to see people helping each other out with tips, customers sharing best practices, and self-hosted users sharing their cool personal projects. Building an Open Source product is as much about building a thriving community as it is about growing users, so it's great to see the traction of keen Lightdashers since we started it only in Summer 2022!

💎 Next up, we wanted to call out the Milestone Mayhem section below because the team has been hard at work scoping out three of our MOST requested features ever:

• ⏰ Scheduled reporting
• 🍱 Embedding
• ⌨️ Content as Code

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😱😱😱 that's right - these behemoths are on their way! As usual, we're building in the open, so if you have any thoughts or specific requirements, let us know either via the Community or via the relevant Github issue. And remember you can always check out our Public Roadmap.

Now, let's get straight into some big new features - including two HUGE new external integrations 💥💥 ...

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🆕 Feature showcase

A selection of the new features we've launched in the last month.

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🌈 Colour in with Conditional Formatting

You can now apply conditional formatting to values in table charts.

Sometimes it’s helpful to highlight certain values in your tables when they meet a specific condition. You can set up conditional formatting rules by going to the Configure tab on the table chart and then selecting the "Conditional formatting" tab. See it in action or read more in the docs.

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🪢 Sharing in Slack!

We now support sharing charts and dashboards via Slack with a handy preview. All you need to do is head to the Settings in your Lightdash instance, and find the new Slack menu. When you select "Add to Slack", and add Lightdash to your Slack Organization. Then, when sharing a Lightdash URL within your Slack Org, you'll be presented with the title of the chart/dashboard, description and even a full image preview of its very latest state. There's even an "Open in Lightdash" button that will take you straight there. See it in action or read more in the docs.

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🔩 Drill into your data with drill-by

You can drill into a metric in your chart or results table to better understand a point in your chart. Selecting drill by lets you group your metric by a dimension, like the total revenue segmented by (or grouped by) product type. See it in action or read more in the docs.

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🎯 Set targets with reference lines

Add reference lines to your charts with just the click of a button!

You can use reference lines to set targets, track your goals, or point out important thresholds in your charts. See it in action or read more in the docs.

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💯 Percentile metrics

We now support Percentile metric types. This new metric type generates the given percentile of the values in the given field. You could use it to create an easy median, or, say an upper quartile. The percentile metric can be used on any numeric dimension or, for custom SQL, any valid SQL expression that gives a numeric table column. See it in action or read more in the docs.

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🐰 Trino query engine support

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By popular demand, we now support the Trino query engine! We're delighted to support a fellow open-source tool with a cute mascot.

The big takeaway here is that this means by extension, we support a ton more data warehouses (via Trino) than those listed in our docs. So, MySQL users, we got you covered now!

For those that don't know, Trino is an open-source distributed SQL query engine that allows for low-latency, high-performance querying of large data sets. The database is designed to work with data stored in a variety of systems, including Hadoop, HDFS, Amazon S3, and many more. It can be used to query data stored in these systems using standard SQL.

Read more in the docs.

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🔐 Onelogin SSO support

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As part of our Enterprise package, we now offer OneLogin SSO support.

OneLogin gives users the ability to access all their logins (e.g. to different web services, like Lightdash) by first logging into the simple OneLogin interface. (That's the single sign-on part) They then don't need to manage various bookmarks, passwords and cookies across a bunch of services. We have supported other SSO providers in the past e.g. Okta, and now we're delighted to add the much requested OneLogin to the list.

Talk to us if you're interested!

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👩‍🏭 Friday Facts

Some of our favourite facts and stats from the last few weeks.

• ✅ All-time Github issues closed: 1693
• ☑️ Current open issues: 479
• 🗂 Current Lightdash release version: v0.394.0
• 🔥 Community growth since last Feature day: +11%
  
• 😻 Number of Lightdash supporters in the dbt Slack Community: 558
• 🧃 Number of Dalston Rhubarb Sodas consumed by Ian today: 3

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...they're just so incredibly tasty. Rhubarb fans, look no further.

By the way, if you're not in our Community already then you are really being left out of all of the real fun... join here. It's free, easy, and you get to chat to us and the rest of our community. Whenever you want. Forever. dbt tips? Lightdash feature requests? SQL jokes? We have it all.

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🐛 Bug fixes

Just a small selection of the nasty bugs we've squashed in the last month (yes, there were even more!):

• 🕴️ Hover states in dashboards weren't causing some confusion, so we made them a lot clearer! [#4274 and #4275]
• 📖 Compiling should be much quicker now for Snowflake users with MASSIVE amounts of data in their warehouse. [#4263]
• 📈 Thanks to early adopters of our brand new reference line feature, we were informed of a bug with lines not showing up when they're above axis limits. This is now fixed! [#4248]
• ⚙️ The chart config panel wasn't displaying properly if you had many series on your chart and went into the series menu.  [#4127]
• 🚪 The SQL query for filters wasn't properly escaped. [#4129]
• 🚬 The first filter input box took up the whole screen width. [#4003]
• 🔗 If a chart had enough filters, using "Explore From Here" would return an HTTP 431 error due to the URL being too long. [#4137]
• 🔤 Values that appeared in the autocomplete feature were not sorted alphabetically. [#2773]

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Thank you to our wonderful community for continuing to use Lightdash and be open and honest with feedback and bugs. We love bug reports more than breakfast, so keep them coming!

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💎 Milestone Mayhem

We're using Github milestones to track the larger pieces of upcoming work. You can also check out our public roadmap for a longer term view.

• ⏰ Scheduled reporting - this will allow you to set up scheduled reporting in Lightdash, first via Slack and then via email.
• 🍱 Embedding - this is for embedding Lightdash charts and dashboards in external tools, like Salesforce, or in the customer portal of a B2B company.
• ⌨️ Content as Code - charts and dashboards as code! Think terraform for BI, then multiply it by a modest cool factor of 1.5.
• 📊 Usage analytics - to help you see various usage statistics for charts and dashboards, for example the number of views. This will also help admins cleanup unused content.
• 🏡 Homepage improvements - it's been a while since we changed the homepage layout and it hasn't grown on us. There's a lot to improve to be a more helpful starting point for the user.

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🎥 Lightdash Cinema

In a brand new feature for this newsletter, we introduce to you Lightdash Cinema - it's just like a regular cinema, except it's a BI thought leadership YouTube video in a free email newsletter, BYO popcorn 😎.

This week - check out our CEO, Hamzah talking at the Airbyte move(data) conference about how the tooling for analytics hasn't kept up with how complex the job has become, and what needs to be done about it...

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💞 That's it for today

👷‍♀️ If you're interested in what we're building here, get involved! Don’t watch from the sidelines, help us build the future of BI. We’ve got something for everybody:

• Join us in the Lightdash Community Slack
• Show us some open-source love and star the repo on GitHub (we plant a tree for every star we get! ⭐ 👉 🌱 )
• Try out our hosted offering - Lightdash Cloud

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Much love from the Lightdash team ❤️