Changelog

🧩 Embedded Analytics​

Delivering data analytics and insights to your customers shouldn’t take weeks or months of in-house product development.

Introducing embedded analytics from Hex — making it faster than ever to ship first-class data experiences for your customers, and grow new revenue streams.

Build, customize, and embed stunning dashboards into your web app using:

• 🔒 Row-level security for showing customers only their own data
• 💅 Custom app themes for a white-labeled UI to match your branding
• 🧩 Embed API with quick and easy pass-through authentication
• 📈 Scalable pricing for use cases of all sizes
• And more!

Need to see it to believe it? Join us for a live product demo and Q&A on April 17th, where we'll build and embed a Hex app in under 10 minutes.

Read our full announcement to learn more.

Welcome to our first release notes of spring — and it's a big one, with new features and improvements across almost every part of the product that broaden (or should I say widen?) what you can do with charts, published apps, Explore cells, and more.

💾 Saved Views in published apps​

A single data app often serves a bunch of different audiences who care about different results. Introducing Saved Views: a way for users to save combinations of inputs and filters when viewing a published app, so they can get to insights that are relevant to them, faster.

On Team and Enterprise plans, you can create saved views, list them for others to use, and schedule them to re-run on a regular cadence for fresh data. Our team’s favorite new workflow? Get personalized conditional notifications based on a saved view.

Check out our blog post to learn more.

📊 Charts from wide-format data​

Until today, you needed to write extra pre-processing in Python to make charts from wide-format data (i.e., spanning multiple columns of data). Now it only takes a click to:

• Create stacked or grouped bar and column charts from multiple columns
• Facet by multiple columns
• Plot multiple columns on the x-axis

In this new era of wide-format-friendly charts, the need to “tidy up” your data using the Pandas .melt() operation has effectively melted away. 😀

🔔 Notifications with CSVs & configurable screenshots​

On Team and Enterprise plans, you now have two new notification options:

• Include a CSV attachment by selecting a table display in a published app.
• Send screenshot attachment of specific tabs or individual cells that triggered a conditional notification.

Mix and match CSVs with PDF or PNG screenshot attachments to send notifications to yourself and that VP who wants daily updates on new customer signups delivered straight to their inbox.

🧭 Use Explore cell results downstream​

Hex makes it easy for code, no-code, and queries to live together in a canvas made of atomic building blocks that stack and engage with one another.

That’s why it's a rite of passage for every cell type to return a dataframe. Now that Explore cells do exactly that, you can truly integrate them into your notebook to unlock tremendous new workflows.

Got an exploration you want to dig further into? Just throw it into a notebook and start writing SQL or Python against the output of the Explore cell, or chain downstream no-code cells to your heart’s desire.

🧱 Bulk update components​

Make one small tweak to a component, and suddenly every downstream reference is out of date! With great power comes great responsibility, and now you’ve got options depending on how authoritarian you’re feeling. 😈

Our new UI for managing a component’s project references provides useful metadata to help you understand how components are being used and which projects to prioritize updating.

If you're an Admin, this comes with the ability to force update all (or some) project drafts to use the latest version of a component.

Feeling democratic? You can notify component consumers that a new version is available and let each project’s Editor decide whether to update.

We’ve seen customers try to wrangle components with hundreds of downstream references. Now, it can be as easy as a few clicks to keep components consistent across projects.

⌨️ Magic Typeahead​

Write code faster with AI-powered inline completions in Python cells. Magic Typeahead is now out of beta and readier than ever to give you powerful, tailored suggestions that take into account your project context as you’re typing.

Other improvements​

• View SQL generated by Explore: Hex generates SQL under the hood to power analysis performed with Explore. Instead of pulling up a separate tab with your data warehouse’s query history, you can now see the compiled queries directly in Hex by clicking the “View generated SQL” option in the Explore UI’s three-dot menu.
• Dropdown display labels: This feature we announced last time to enhance dropdown input parameters needed a bit more love — but it’s ready for use now. Thanks for your patience!

🤝 Semantic Model Sync​

Today, we're launching the public beta of Semantic Model Sync to enrich self-serve analytics in Hex with trusted metrics and business logic from dbt MetricFlow, Cube, and LookML (in private beta).

Now, you can empower stakeholders with governed measures, dimensions, and joins for consistent self-serve results in Explore — without compromising the flexibility of ad-hoc analysis or getting locked into a proprietary spec.

Read our full announcement to learn more about how you can import modeled data from your semantic layer into Hex.

This batch of features falls into the category we like to call “pixel-light, impact-heavy”: chart reference lines, a fresh new outline, dropdown display labels… and they’ve just been delivered into your Hex notebooks with laser precision. Hope you enjoy!

📊 Add reference lines to charts​

You can now add vertical and horizontal reference lines to x- and y-axes in charts to indicate targets, thresholds, or important points in time. Want to add a super thick, greenish-brown line with a label at a 90-degree angle in the bottom-right corner? You’re free to style as you please (but we can’t save you from the critiques of that one stakeholder who’s really into color theory).

📔 Redesigned notebook outline​

In November, we released collapsible sections, which make it easier to organize your most complex projects — thanks to all of you who wrote in with some love!

We got hooked on the fan-mail dopamine hit and kept going by building an all-new “compact” outline with a mini overview and condensed summary for easier navigation and search within your notebook:

We've been using this internally for a few weeks now, and it’s changed the game — making it easier to navigate and work with big, gnarly projects. We also made some improvements to sections, including the ability to drag into a collapsed section.

Excited to hear what you think!

🔑 Dropdown display labels​

Note: This feature will be enabled and generally available starting on February 7, 2025.

Some input values are not user-friendly. There’s always that one person on the team who knows user #14925300281 is Jeff, but for the rest of us, displaying the name or email is way more helpful.

With dropdown input parameters, you can now select a display column to render (e.g., email) but still have it return the underlying value (e.g., User ID).

Other improvements​

• Faster first run for published apps: We reduced the number of cells that need to run for you to get your answer by only running upstream dependent cells. (Before this update, first runs for published apps ran all the cells — even if they weren’t in the dependency line.)
• Component upgrade notifications: Now when you publish a new version of a component, you can (optionally) notify all the folks who own projects consuming your component that a new version is available.
• Db2 data connection: We recently built a new data connection to support Db2. This feature is currently in private beta, so reply to this email if you’re interested in testing it out!
• Native decimal support for Snowflake: We now support larger numbers using the Python Decimal data type. In the Snowflake configuration panel, you can toggle on "Native decimal support" for up to 38-digit integers.

At Hex, December is a time for connecting, reflecting, and shipping! Others may slow down for the holidays, we cannot, we literally do not know how to do it, so here’s a tree full of presents we got for you, with much more on the way.

This week’s release has a bunch of improvements to much-used features like SQL and charts – but first, our most-requested feature…

🧮 Advanced compute profiles, now in GA​

They’re finally here: more powerful compute profiles and GPUs 💪

Our new compute profiles give you access to more memory and compute power, allowing Hex to meet the challenges of your most demanding workloads. Choose from a variety of amazing acronyms like 4XL (16CPU, 128GB RAM) and V100 GPU (6CPU, 56GB CPU RAM, 16GB GPU RAM).

These advanced compute options can handle any compute-intensive Python task, whether that’s offline-training for your fraud detection model, fine-tuning an OCR transformer with GPU’s, or just working with a massive dataset. Now you can do it all, right in Hex.

Advanced compute is billed per-minute of usage, and we’ve included admin controls for cost observability and management, including spend limits, access controls, and usage logs. Check out the blog to learn more.

🧭 Explorer workspace role​

When we introduced our “Explore” UI a few weeks ago, the first thing we heard was, “this is awesome, is there some way I can get this turned on for stakeholders?”

Well, the day has arrived: you can now provision users as “Explorers”. This allows them to start new Explores, Explore-from-Here in published apps, and subscribe to metric notifications (but not start full projects or write code).

This role is perfect for the data-literate folks in your organization who want to be able to slice-and-dice data or get updates, but don’t need the full firepower of a Hex Editor seat. Our product team wrote about the new Explorer workflows in a blog early this week - take a look!

Interested in getting this turned on for your workspace? Get in touch.

🫶 One-to-many and many-to-many no-code joins​

No-code joins in Explorations now support one-to-many and many-to-many join relationships.

Hex will automatically detect duplicate rows that arise as a result of your join, and using the unique keys specified in the join configuration, accurately calculate aggregations on both the base and joining table. Plus, Magic can now intelligently generate joins when you ask questions, making data exploration even simpler.

Don't worry about keeping track of these join relationships yourself - Hex will warn you if the join you've configured will lead to inaccurate results!

📈 Smarter chart labels​

One of you (not naming names!) sent some feedback calling our chart labels “trashy” because of their tendency to overlap and… honestly, you had a point!

As part of our never-ending quest to make charts in Hex beautiful, we’ve improved the way labels and axes are rendered including:

• Labels not showing in vertical bar charts if they don't fit vertically in their parent bar
• A new "auto" position option for line and area charts which will automatically layout the labels so they don't overlap with any lines or other line/area data labels
• We’ve also introduced a new “minimum tick step” setting on the y-axis.

Take a look.

We have many more improvements for charts on the way – including support for “wide” data and some nice performance boosts!

✍️ Better SQL autocomplete​

Speaking of things we’ve heard from you all about – SQL autocomplete. We’ve made some big improvements here:

• Autocomplete now activates for column names after a .
• Automatically re-open autocomplete panel after a previous activation – for example, if you select a schema name to autocomplete, we then re-open autocomplete with table names
• More consistent capitalization, using the previous alphabetic character in the SQL cell if there haven’t been characters typed

Our internal data team is loving the upgrades, hopefully you do too!

⤴️ Visualize pivot values as rows​

In the olden days, you used to only be able to visualize pivot values as columns, but now, in December 2024, we live in a miraculous future where you can view them as rows, too. What a time to be alive 🌅

🔗 Automatic markdown-style hyperlink rendering in tables​

It’s now easy to make pretty links in tables with automatic hyperlink rendering. When your data includes markdown-style links like [Hex](https://hex.ai), we'll automatically transform them into beautiful, clickable links - no more messy URLs cluttering up your tables!

Other improvements​

• You can now cancel queries fired off from explorations, so if you accidentally kick off a bigger-than-expected task, you can shut it down before it runs up your warehouse bill
• We now support relative line numbers in SQL and code cells, which will come as a delight for y’all nerds that have Vim key bindings enabled. To use, open the command palette (cmd+p) and choose “Toggle relative line numbers”