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Rill 0.36 - Hot reloading, scheduling and DuckDB 0.9! ๐Ÿ”ฅ

ยท 3 min read
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โšก Rill Developer is a tool that makes it effortless to transform your datasets with SQL and create fast, exploratory dashboards.

To try out Rill Developer, check out these instructions and let us know over on Discord if you encounter any problems or have ideas about how to improve Rill Developer!

We've always dreamed big at Rill. Our vision is to provide the fastest way to create insightful dashboards. This release features many small improvements, from more configurable dashboards to more flexible data orchestration. Under the hood, this version of Rill packs a new asynchronous orchestration engine, paving the way for file watching, scheduled source refresh, non-blocking source refresh, and many other upcoming features.

Hot reloading with multi-editor supportโ€‹

From the start, Rill was built around the idea of keystroke-by-keystroke feedback when modelling data. This release includes a file watcher which adds true hot reloading and supports multiple simultaneous editors. This means you can keep two windows of Rill open at the same time, or use an editor such as VS Code side-by-side with the dashboard you're developing.

hot-reload-0-36

Configure source refresh in YAMLโ€‹

You can now configure source refresh schedules directly from a source's YAML file using cron expressions. After a source refresh completes, all models and dashboards that derive from the source will also be refreshed.

Example usage โ€“ the following S3 source will refresh every hour:

# sources/foo.yaml
type: s3
uri: s3://bucket/foo/*.parquet
refresh:
cron: 0 * * * *

Non-blocking source refreshโ€‹

Source data refresh now runs in the background, enabling you to browse cloud dashboards while the underlying data is being refreshed.

This feature also extends to the local development experience, where source import will no longer block the application. This means you can stay productive while waiting for slow sources to download!

Free-form ISO duration support default_time_rangeโ€‹

You can now specify any ISO 8601 duration as the default time range for a dashboard. For example, you can set it to 5 days with default_time_range: P5D, or 2 weeks with default_time_range: P2W. This feature gives you full customizability to set your favorite time range as your dashboard default.

Improved project navigation on cloudโ€‹

We have revamped the cloud overview page to make it easier to navigate to your projects.

DuckDB 0.9โ€‹

Last, but not least, this version upgrades Rill to the new version of DuckDB, v0.9.1. Head over to the DuckDB blog for more details about all its new features.