Make BI Stand for Business Improvement
With exploding cells, your most complex SQL query or model just got a whole lot simpler.
Whether you're a data engineer trying to understand a complex data model, or an analyst trying to make sense of a heavily-nested SQL query, your approach probably involves the same steps:
Aside from obviously being less than ideal, this process is too important to be left to a patchwork of tools with human glue. Being able to understand, communicate, and reuse complex logic can make the difference between a group of data people and an effective data team.
One of the key features of Count from day one has been the ability to chain queries together through cells. This allowed us to build up complex pieces of logic step-by-step in the canvas, all the while making sure it was annotated and easy for others to follow.
With exploding cells, you can now do that same workflow - but in reverse.
Take any complex SQL query or model and explode the cell into its component subqueries:
To explode a query into a DAG, click the 💥 button on the cell menu.
With each subquery as its own cell, it means you can easily explore any part of your query.
Being able to communicate all you've discovered in this complex query or model makes all your hard work worth it. That could be:
Sharing a decomposed query or model with annotations makes it easy for other people to follow your work, making it easier to get buy-in, and to make sure your work is reused later.
And, of course, should you need to export your new complex SQL query back into your data modeling tool, or code management tool, you can always copy the full, compiled SQL of any cell back out:
If you use dbt for your data modeling, exploding cells allow you to quickly explore your models, uncover bugs faster, and communicate suggested changes to your team more effectively.
But this is just the beginning of what we're working on for you.
If you're still reading (wow, thank you) and would like to talk to us about what else we're building for the dbt workflow, please let me know (taylor[at]count[dot]co)!