❓FAQ

Find answers to frequently asked questions here

I just signed my organization up for a trial. How can I make the most of it?

We have a recommended path in our Getting Started section. If you follow these steps, you'll be able to see the full range of Select Star's features and decide if it's something you'd like to use.

The most important thing is to get your data warehouse and BI tools connected to Select Star right away. If you experience any difficulty connecting, please contact us via Intercom or send an email to [e-mail].

After your data is connected to Select Star, you'll be able to start adding owners and tags to your datasets, and this will help you get a feel for the product. You can also check out some data discovery workflows in our documentation that will show you how you might use Select Star to accomplish certain things.

How can I see how people are using data in my organization?

Much of Select Star's application is built around giving context to your data. Click the links below to see some pages focused around context. These pages will go over features such as Lineage, Popular Queries & Joins, Top Users, Downstream Dashboards, and more.

How can I get the full context of this data?Table Page

How is the popularity of different data objects calculated?

Popularity works different for tables/columns and dashboards or reports.

For tables and columns, it is based on the number of times a piece of data has been queried, by a number of users, over a period of up to 90 days.

For dashboards/reports, it is based on impressions. Popularity is based on the number of views by a number of users over a period of up to 90 days.

How are search results ordered in Select Star?

Search results are based on a number of factors. The biggest factor is the keywords put into the search. The results are then ordered by popularity. This is why you may see less popular results first, if the first result matches the keyword better.

There are a number of other factors that determine the results to a lesser extent.

My search results mostly match what I expect, but there are a few I want to rank higher/lower. How can I do this?

You cannot manually change the order of the search results in Select Star. However, we find people usually ask this question when they want to see results that are relevant to a specific business group/project before others.

If you have multiple dashboards that match the keyword "Profit", for example, and one belongs to the finance team and the other belongs to the sales team, we strongly recommend assigning tags to the datasets.

Tags are searchable just like anything else in Select Star. You can also use tags to narrow your search results on the search results page. This can help certain users find datasets most relevant to them more easily.

How is Last Refreshed calculated on the Table Overview page?

The Last Refreshed date indicates the most recent time a table was updated based on metadata and query activity. This helps you understand how up-to-date a table is before using it for analysis or reporting. If a table hasn’t been refreshed in a while, it may indicate stale data.

How it works:

• For most tables, this reflects the last time the table was modified in your data warehouse, such as when new data was added or structure changes were made.

• If there’s no direct record of when the table was last modified, Select Star will use the most recent metadata sync timestamp as the Last Refreshed date.

• The Last Refreshed date is always based on the latest available information and ensures consistency across your datasets.

Note: Some refresh delays may occur due to ingestion schedules or metadata sync timing.

How often does Select Star update?

All metadata will update automatically every 24 hours. Admins can trigger manual metadata sync from the settings page. This means that changes in your data source should be reflected in Select Star within this timeframe.

Why can't I edit documentation/tags/owners in Select Star?

Depending on your role, you may not be able to make changes to metadata (documentation/tags/owners) in Select Star.

You should contact someone within your organization to ask for more permissions. Depending on your role and how your organization wants to use Select Star, an Admin on your Select Star instance can change your role.

You may not be able to edit documentation in Select Star even if you are a Data Manager or Admin if your organization has disabled editing documentation for that data source in Select Star (meaning, the data source is read-only in Select Star for everyone).

If my company has documentation in a tool (Snowflake, Looker, etc.) and someone edits it in Select Star, what happens?

Select Star automatically pulls documentation from your tools into the app. Once edits are made to the documentation inside of Select Star, we will stop writing the documentation back to the tool. We do this to ensure you have one consistent "source of truth" for your documentation.

You can choose to write Select Star documentation back to your tool programmatically using our API.

If you would like to disable editing descriptions for a particular data source inside of Select Star and only draw documentation from the tool itself, please contact us via Intercom or email [e-mail].

Will you eventually support XYZ integration?

We may already be working on it! We're trying to support as many of the most popular tools as we can.

If we have multiple customers requesting the same integrations, that'll move them up on the roadmap. Please let us know if there's a particular integration you'd like to see added.

My company uses a custom-built ETL tool. How can I integrate it with Select Star?

You can use Select Star's API to integrate custom tools, metadata, monitoring, etc.

How can I enable dark mode?

Google Chrome includes a native dark mode feature that can be enabled via experimental flags. You can enable it with the following steps:

1. Open Chrome and type chrome://flags in the address bar.

2. Search for "Auto Dark Mode for Web Contents."

3. Set it to "Enabled" and restart the browser.

I don't see my question answered here. How can I get help?

Contact us at any time by clicking the green Intercom icon in the bottom right corner of the page, or send an email to [e-mail].