Feature Friday 4 - The one where we thank the community

🌟 Feature Friday 🌟

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The one where we thank the community

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Hello all and welcome to another glorious Feature day!

This week we're focusing on thanking you - our wonderful community for your support! Our Slack community has multiplied several times in the last few months and we're loving being able to talk to you, hear your feedback and help solve some big BI problems. When we started Lightdash, we wanted to build the BI tool we always wanted as data practitioners, and the community's support and involvement only strengthen that vision! So thank you from the whole team and please keep the feature requests, bug reports and best-practice discussions going :)

And an extra special thanks to all the folks who contributed on our GitHub repo below...

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🌈 dbt's Coalesce 2022 conference 🌈

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That's right, you'll be able to catch us in person at the Coalesce conference in New Orleans from 17th to 21st October!

We'll be there in booth #316 in the Activation Hall on Wednesday and Thursday running a super special workshop which will be your only chance to get some limited edition, handmade Lightdash swag. Maybe you'll get to make your own?

We're also keen to meet those of you considering Lightdash - and we'll come prepared with a brand new version of our demo - it'll be a great moment to see if Lightdash can work for you and to get in some feedback or feature requests.

If you want to come but still don't have your ticket, before you buy, message us in our Slack community for a special 15% community member discount on your ticket.

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🆕 Feature showcase

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

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Multi-sort just got better

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We've supercharged the user experience of multi-sorting - it's now clearer and easier. We've done this by adding a clearer visual hint above the table which only appears when the table is sorted. Clicking into it, you'll be shown all the fields that the table has been sorted by, in order of sort, and whether each one is sorted ascending or descending. You can also reorder the sort, and remove sort options. Read more in the docs or see it in action! Happy sorting!

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Clickable links

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You can now link externally directly from dimension values! Adding urls to a dimension allows your users to click dimension values in the UI and take actions, like opening an external tool with a url, or open at a website. You can use liquid templates to customise the link based on the value of the dimension. See it in action, or check out our docs for dimension templating to read about how to implement this for yourself, and to see what else might be possible with this new power!

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Instant autocompletion for string dimensions

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Autocomplete for string filters now works before you run your query

We've made filters easier and more intuitive by adding autocomplete before you run your query. This is available in Chart view as well as in Dashboard filters - so it's much easier to now find what you're looking for! See it in action.

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Support for dbt v1.2.0

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Yes, we now support dbt version 1.2.0, which itself comes with a bunch of new features and fixes!

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Is Lightdash down?

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Probably not! But if Lightdash is down you'll find out at status.lightdash.com. Our status page shows the current status of all our services so you've got a complete picture of Lightdash's availability in one place. Subscribe to be the first to know.

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👩🏭 Friday Facts

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

• ✅ All-time Github issues closed: 1312
• ☑️ Current open issues: 333
• 🗂 Current Lightdash release version: v0.267.1
• 🔥 Community growth since last Feature day: +50%
• 😻 Number of Lightdash supporters in the dbt Slack Community: 477!
• 🌈 T-shirts tie dyed at Uptime 2022: 35

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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

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

• ❌ Oops, someone deleted our main space in the demo! It's ok, we restored it and patched the underlying issue. [#3259]
• ♻️ "Refresh dbt" is dead. Long live "Refresh dbt"! Albeit, this time, more sensibly. [#3340]
• 🗓 Dates "in the last x days/weeks/months" in Bigquery now works as expected. [#3249]
• #️⃣ Big number styling configuration is now properly available for appropriate types. [#3180]
• 👤 Sometimes, new users were getting sent to a preview project on their first login. [#3123]
• ⚫️ You weren't able to query tables with a period (".") in the name. [#3267]
• ⤵️ Table config was disabled sometimes when there were results, so if you pivoted a table with too many dimensions, you weren't actually able to remove the pivot. [#3238]
• ⛔️ Logging in using the CLI if you had zero projects sometimes errored out. [#3225]
• 📏 The default padding for chart tiles is more sensible making smaller tiles look a lot better without any extra config. [#3199]

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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

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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.

• 📤 Sharing in Slack is coming soon.
• 🪹 We're aiming to help nudge users in the right direction when faced with a blank screen, empty state or confusing option.
• ⌨️ The CLI workflow is getting even easier. Getting started with a new project should take fewer steps with this milestone.
• 🔐 Based on some community feedback, there's going to be a new permissions role that we've added that to our big permissions milestone.

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💞 That's it for today

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📡 Stay tuned for the Lightdash Demo Week which is coming up in a couple weeks along with some big announcements! Otherwise, maybe see you at Coalesce 17-21 Oct in New Orleans?

👷‍♀️ 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 ❤️