Give us your thoughts on v0.42

[maz]

There's a ton of stuff in this release, and we're really excited to bring it to you and hear what you think. Here are a few highlights:

• Models: create your own queryable data sources from a SQL or GUI question, enrich them with metadata, and organize them in your collections.
• Updated Slack integration: Metabase now uses the Slack app API instead of the deprecated bot integration.
• A revamped custom expressions editor: better, faster, stronger, as Daft Punk might put it.
• Nicer Filter and Summarize UX: if you use the GUI query builders, you should notice a number of small improvements to how filters look and how breakouts work.
• More visualizations for dashboard subscriptions: waterfall, area, progress, and combo charts.
• Updated navigation: it's a bit more intuitive to create new things now.

Check out our blog for more info.

Thanks in advance for your feedback! If you find a bug or problem, you can please report issues here.

[Rmonik]

In the new 0.42 release, questions that are pinned in a collection now already pre-render automatically in the collection itself. We find this a terrible feature for multiple reasons:

• We have long running questions pinned, so they take ages to render
• While they are querying, the title of the question isn't even visible, so you have no idea which question you're looking at
• Most of our pinned questions rely on variables, which are not enterable
• If a variable is mandatory, the question won't render and there will just be a "There was a problem displaying this chart" message.

We've started unpinning all questions now and just adding prefixes to them to set them to the top of the alphabetical list. But is there a way to just disable this functionality?

[notrom]

Totally agree @Rmonik it's changed the meaning of pinning a question in a collection. I gave that feedback on the rc2 release in the hope that it would be reconsidered. It's slowed down the browsing experience and like you we've had to start unpinning questions as I couldn't come up with a reasonable workaround. We now only pin dashboards.

I get the idea and like it as an option but I don't think it works well for all questions.

[notrom]

It doesn't look like the "+" (New...) button in a collection has the option to create a new SQL query

It does appear in the "+ New" button on the header bar

You've got to hop through extra hoops to create a new SQL query directly in a collection. Or am I missing something? Would be nice if the available options were consistent.

[notrom]

Table column header tooltips are a nice addition, they can give good context (is this a category, ID, FK etc.) about a field but I'm finding some of the data they present a little misleading. It looks like min, max, avgs for numbers and dates are coming from the Metabase application database, field Fingerprint value, the issue with this is this is doesn't seem to update as the data changes.

From the doco at Troubleshooting syncs, scans, and fingerprinting

Metabase only fingerprints each column once, unless the administrator explicitly tells it to fingerprint the column again, or in the rare event that a new release of Metabase changes the fingerprinting logic.

I'm sure that logic works great for the original intent of the fingerprints, but I don't think it's a good choice for displaying to end users as a field summary. I'm aware that fingerprints only cover the top 10,000 rows, this will also likely skew this towards early data.

For example here's what it's telling me about the Metabase View Log table, it's clearly contradicting itself:

I like the idea behind the tooltips, I just wish they represented my data correctly.

(EDITED TO ADD as discourse won't allow more than 3 consecutive replies ...)

@maz I know this is an older topic but hopefully you're still looking at it.

"Text or Category" and "Number" filters on dashboards are really useful, I've already made use of these multiple times.

One gripe I have though is that once you've selected the sub-type from the "What kind of filter" menu (i.e. Dropdown, Is not, Contains etc.) when creating a new filter, there is no indicator on the filter settings sidebar showing that subtype. How do I know how the "number to filter" value below will be applied?

When you're using the dashboard and entering the a filter value the subtype of the filter is displayed, but that's not visible when editing

Now that I think about it, it's not a v0.42 specific thing. It would be handy to indicate the type and subtype of filters in the filter settings edit sidebar.

Keep up the good work!