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Rill 0.8 – Source viewer & faster column profile calculations

· 3 min read
note

Rill Developer is a tool that makes it effortless to transform your datasets with SQL. These are our release notes for our 0.8 release, still in Tech Preview.

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!

This release brings several improvements around enabling you to see your data faster, as well as improving documentation and clarity within Rill developer.

  • Source viewer—we’ve held off on making it easy to inspect a source dataset because we weren’t sure how to deal with one big problem: rendering a big HTML table full of data is actually really hard to do! We’ve figured something out (see the “virtualized preview tables” bullet below), so with that, we've provided the ability for you to inspect the data sources that you import into Rill Developer with a tabular viewer, similar to what we've previously provided for your data models.
  • Virtualized preview tables—To make the source viewer to actually work with real datasets, we needed another approach to viewing really big tables in the application. This release we’ve added a new “virtual tables” implementation, which means your browser renders only what’s visible in the viewport, not the whole thing. This improves load times of assets as well as improves the overall smoothness of the application. We have more work to do on this end – for instance, infinite scrolling – but this is a step in the right direction.
  • Faster profiling— as our application has evolved we have created lots of new features to surface more robust data insights with every keystroke through profiling. With each new feature comes a small query that we send to duckDB to power the application and lots of small features really add up! We always want Rill to feel conversation-fast and delightful, so with this release we have focused on improving the speed of our table profiling code, keeping Rill delightfully fast faster than ever.
  • Rename your assets from the sidebar—previously, you were only able to rename your dashboards and data models from the main header in the central workspace pane. As of this update you will now be able to rename these assets from the navigation sidebar.
  • Improved wording and documentation— we've made a number of improvements to tooltips and wording throughout Rill, as well as expanding our documentation about the process of building dashboards from metrics. We've also added a link to our documentation to the footer of the navigation bar so that docs will be easily accessible from anywhere within Rill.