tl;dr: we’re introducing a new, visual experience for exploring data. It makes it easy to quickly slice, dice, and visualize – whether it's a one-off question, or the beginning of a deep-dive analysis. You can point-and-click, or use natural language to generate explorations with AI.
We're also making a big upgrade to the experience for consuming Hex projects, including conditional notifications, an all-new Explore-from-Here, and more.
Today, Hex is mostly thought of as a power tool for power users; it’s the platform “data people” reach for because legacy products can’t keep up with their needs. It’s used by thousands of data scientists, analysts, and engineers every day to do analyses, develop models, and share the results in interactive apps everyone can use.
But it’s also increasingly relied on by many other people too – folks on product, finance, ops, and marketing teams who want to better understand their world. We believe these mythical “business users” should be first-class citizens in data workflows, and that by connecting everyone in one platform, we can increase collaboration, speed to insight, and ultimately help folks unlock more value from data.
That’s what today’s launch is all about: bringing everyone together with data.
The first big thing is our Explore UI – an all-new experience for slicing, dicing, and visualizing data in Hex. Check it out:
Wayyy back in May, we introduced spreadsheet calculations into tables in Hex, unlocking a more familiar way of authoring logic to millions of Excel jockeys world-wide – and of course those are built into Explore as well:
We’ve also added no-code Joins, allowing you to do on-the-fly no-code enrichment of data, right from this cell:
You can use a standalone Explore to answer a “qq”, but if you decide you want to go deeper, you can just click and it becomes the first cell in a project, and then you can use the results downstream in other cells, including Python, SQL, or no-code:
Architecting Explore as a cell matches the core “building block” philosophy of Hex projects. This means that it can be used as a standalone analysis experience, but also as a way to query or transform data in the scope of a more complex project.
We’ve integrated AI into Explore from the get-go, allowing users to kickstart an analysis with simple natural language. Just ask a question and Hex will search across your data and generate a new Explore:
But often times, the best answer to a question is an existing one. And teams already create thousands of projects in Hex, complete with endorsed statuses and categories. So our Ask Magic prompt bar can return those as well, “deflecting” questions toward existing, trusted analyses the data team has already built:
This new Magic feature is in private beta. Email [email protected] for access.
From very early on with Hex, we wanted to solve the Sharing Gap – the delta between the data teams driving insight and the perceived impact across the organization. Our “data app” experience is a big part of this, making it easy to build and publish interactive experiences that others in the organization can benefit from.
Today, we’re introducing a few big upgrades:
Users with the Explore permission to an app can now configure and subscribe to their own notifications for an app – including conditional notifications triggered on specific logic:
Content can show up in email or Slack, either on a schedule or triggered by the data. For example, when you want to celebrate your team hitting a big milestone!
Last year, we introduced an experimental version of the ability to Explore off of existing cells. As dramatically foreshadowed above, this has been upgraded with our new Explore UI!
You can also now save Explores from apps, which is useful for times you’re interested in a certain configuration or drill-down that you want to come back to again
These new interfaces for exploration are great – but only part of the picture. Making sure people are using the right data is big too – and that’s where semantic models come in.
We launched an integration with dbt’s Semantic Model in 2022, and it’s proven to be a useful way for teams to develop analyses on top of governed information about relationships and measures.
Today, we’re taking our semantic integrations further, pulling semantic concepts into more places, starting with the Explore UI, which now allows you to access measures and joins directly.
You can browse datasets right from within Hex, and these semantic definitions will also help inform Magic AI code and Explore generations, as well as unlock some other fun capabilities coming soon!
But where does all this semantic information come from?
If you’re using dbt MetricFlow, we can continue to pull those definitions in, populating semantic objects and updating whenever there’s a change.
We’re now introducing support for LookML. Just point Hex at your repo, and information will automatically flow through and show up as datasets, measures, and joins.
This is in private beta with customers today and we’ll be rolling it out more broadly early next year.
We will continue building integrations with other semantic layer providers, and the ability to define your own semantics within Hex if you don’t already have a semantic provider.
We can’t wait to see what you do with everything we’re launching today. But we’re even more excited for what’s to come, including some of our most-requested ever features landing next month 👀 (Note: Explore is available as a cell in notebooks on all plans and as a standalone UI on Teams and Enterprise plans.)
Dying to know more? Join some upcoming events!
Wed., Nov. 13th - Data Teams & Business Users: A Match Made in Hex - with Hex CEO Barry McCardel
Wed., Nov. 20th - Explore the New Frontiers of No-Code - with Hex PM Sarah Tayeri
Wed., Dec. 4th - A Little Magic, A Lot of Data, and Trusted Answers for All - with Hex PM Olivia Koshy
Watch the recording - How to Hex: Explore - with Hexpert and Developer Advocate Izzy Miller
Want to dive in today? Use our Explore documentation.