August 30, 2024 - Monte Carlo, dbt Cross-Project Lineage

What's New ✨

Monte Carlo Integration Beta!

Data observability is quickly becoming table stakes for most data teams. Data observability tools are great for automatically detecting when there are issues with your data and helping data teams work through them, however, often this context is missing for data consumers.

With our new integration with Monte Carlo, data teams can now surface Data Quality statuses directly within Select Star (their Data Catalog) so that data consumers can better understand how trustable data really is in context of finding and discovering data.

Learn more or reach out to get started!

dbt Cross Project Updates

For teams who have distributed their dbt development across teams, often that means across projects as well, to enable easier incremental development. Our recent updates to our dbt integration now allow you to include all dbt projects within the same Data Source, and be able to easily view lineage across all dbt projects. This is important for end to end visibility, and impact analysis to ensure that dependencies are not missed when making breaking changes.

Adding a new dbt project in an existing data source

To add a new project to an existing data source, simply go to that data source in the Admin section and click + Add a New Project.

What's Improved ➕

BigQuery Structs

We've excited to release an update to our BigQuery integration: support for structs. With the new updates, users can easily see all of the fields within a given struct, and see lineage for full traceability.

BigQuery Struct column lineage

Onboarding Updates

Onboarding and initial setup can be a lot of work and not as straightforward as one might think. That's why we've rolled out a number of changes to help you get a leg up.

Select Star Setup Guide

• Create default Status tags for new Select Star instances

• Setup guide for new Select Star instances, as part of pre-populated pages. Let us know if you want a copy!

• Support helper function: We've created a helper function to automatically set users as data asset owners based on usage (top user) or by database created by metadata. Let us know if you'd like us to help assign a bunch of owners 😉

• Automatically remind invited users who have not accepted their Select Star invite - we don't want them missing out! (don't worry, we only send a few)

• Manual invite reminders - allow Admins to resend invite emails to users manually.

Downstream Dashboards Counts on Database and Schema Pages

Select Star already provide Downstream and Upstream counts to easily show whether a table is a source table, how many upstream / downstream dependencies it may have to highlight highly used tables that will need to be updated with care. Now Select Star also shows Downstream Dashboards to give you a quick way to see if a table is used in any reporting in your BI tools to give a better sense of where that data is used, and how you should consider support and updates.

Downstream Dashboards on the Database page

Other Incremental Updates

• Glossary CSV Upload - Downloadable error report

  • When uploading glossary terms via CSV, if you have any errors, after seeing them in the UI, you will be able to download a report with the errors and which items they refer to.

• Navigation - Keep the experience clean for users who do not have access to everything.

  • Now the Data and Dashboard icons in the primary navigation bar will be hidden for users if they do not have access to any of those assets.

• Data Page Improvements

  • Database and Schema list pages - no longer show unnecessary breadcrumbs in the table names (the database or schema name, depending on which page)

  • Table > Column page will now show 100 columns per page (up from 20)

• When creating tags users can now also add a tag description

• Lineage explorer drilldown - when clicking on an edge, now we will highlight the nodes connected by that edge

Highlighted nodes and edge

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