🌟 Feature Friday 🌟

Is Lightdash The One for you on Valentine's day?

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Hello there, and welcome to another glorious Feature friday!

We start with the big breaking AI <> BI news that chatgpt has kindly written a love letter to Lightdash. Shakespearan, maybe, but perhaps more tragic than romantic. Here it is, in (massively editorialised) full form:

Shipping features so quickly - don't get a fright,
In the BI world, Lightdash starts to shine bright.
With Usage Analytics now, also Chart Pinning delight,
Don't forget view counts, oh what a sight!

Your user interface, so smooth and neat,
A passion for analytics, that can't be beat.
Configuring a chart becomes a love affair,
Data never looked so good, mixed charts beyond compare

As we navigate through data lakes,
Our love for insights, forever grows great.
With the smooth developer workflow I feel complete,
Using the Lightdash CLI, oh what a treat.

So here's to you, my love and guide,
In the BI world, by my side.
A love so pure, a bond so tight,
Happy Valentine's day Lightdash

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Thanks, chatgpt... Now, let's get straight into some big new features...

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🆕 Feature showcase

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

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📊 Usage Analytics

You can now see the key usage statistics for internal use of your Lightdash project! If you've ever wondered:

• What's the overall breakdown of users across viewers, editors and admins?
• How many users run a query once a week?
• Who runs the most queries?
• Who makes the most changes to content?

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Then Usage Analytics is the place for you. You'll find answers to the questions above, and more. This can be helpful to understand internal BI adoption, along with the value provided over time. To get there, just head over to your "Project Settings" and within "Project Management" you'll find the "Usage Analytics" tab. In upcoming releases, we'll add the number of views and updates for every chart and dashboard to help you understand the most (and least 💀) useful content. See it in action or read more in the docs.

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📍 Pinning content to your homepage

You can now pin charts and dashboards to your project homepage. Get your whole team focused on that KPI dashboard! All you need to do is select the more actions menu on a chart or dashboard (on the project homepage, or in a space), and then select "Pin to homepage".

On refresh, that item will now be pinned for everyone that has the relevant permissions to see it. We have plenty of improvements coming to this feature to make it easier to use and also allow pinning of Spaces… watch this 'space'! See it in action.

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👀 Chart + Dashboard view count

Charts and Dashboards now show their overall number of views! Further to our new Usage Analytics feature, now you can see how popular each chart and dashboard is, both in the header on every individual chart and dashboard, along with on your project homepage in the chart and dashboard listings.

This feature is really useful for understanding which content is most important, plus it can be used to help clean up unpopular content! For charts, the view count is incremented every time someone views a chart both on its own, or as part of a dashboard. Note that the view count starts either from when the chart/dashboard was created OR from when we released this feature (whichever is newer)! See it in action or read more about Usage Analytics in our docs.

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👩‍🏭 Friday Facts

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

• ✅ All-time Github issues closed: 1736 (~3/day since last Feature day)
• ☑️ Current open issues: 509
• 🗂 Current Lightdash release version: v0.407.8
• 🔥 Community growth since last Feature day: +7%
  
• 😻 Number of Lightdash supporters in the dbt Slack Community: 567
• ❤️ Number of love letters Lightdash has received from users: 79

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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

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

• ❌ Many CSV files became corrupt when data contained characters like commas and/or semi-colons (recognised by CSV as a delimiter), that is no longer the case! [#4417]
• 📆 Date and Time formats in CSV files are now using more user-friendly formatting (YYYY-MM-DD and HH:mm:ss). [#4417]
• ⁉️ Still on CSV files, column names were being automatically generated from the ID, but are now using the associated labels for improved human readability. [#3922]
• 💯 Big Number tiles are now responsive (for real). A brand new component (AutoFitText) takes care of dynamically setting the font size whenever the tile is resized. [#4396]
• 📊 Chart tiles now have a proper loading state. [#4432]
• 🗂️ You can now open any link from the New and Help menus in a new tab. They should also be more consistent and easier to use. [#4245]
• 📈 Dashboards should now load and reload upon filter change much faster thanks to a better handling of API calls and a new endpoint.[#4259]

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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. You can find all our milestones here, but for this email we've selected these few new or recently updated milestones:

• 📊 Usage analytics - we finished the milestone! More improvements are on their way in the future though, as mentioned above in Feature Showcase.
• 🔐 Permissions - we've added some more issues to this milestone, for example to create new Roles for Developers and a very low access Viewer role, along with tighten up the granularity at which you can set permissions. Lots to come!
• ⏰ Scheduled reporting - we've made a lot of progress on this one and the first release is nearly ready!

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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 ❤️