July 2024 Summaries

Hex has introduced Calculations to empower business users to explore and analyze data independently, without constantly relying on the data team. This feature allows users familiar with spreadsheet functions to calculate their own metrics, build custom segments, create advanced filters, and develop interactive data apps using input parameters. By enabling business users to answer their own questions and perform complex data operations, Calculations reduce the workload of data teams while fostering a good data culture within organizations.

OM1, a healthcare analytics company, faced challenges with their fragmented workflow as they struggled to keep up with evolving data demands from business users. To address this issue, they built a flexible self-serve data app using Snowflake and Hex, which allowed business users to manage data mappings independently without writing SQL or Python code. This solution not only saved the data team hours of time every week but also accelerated decision-making processes across the organization by empowering internal teams with better access to data insights.

Hex, a data visualization platform, has donated VegaFusion back to the official Vega community while maintaining its BSD-3 license. The company will continue supporting and developing VegaFusion, which seamlessly integrates with Vega to push aggregation to the backend for frontend interactivity. This allows users to visually explore data of any size without browser limitations. Hex has contributed numerous new features to VegaFusion over the past two years and integrated it as an optional dependency into Vega-Altair, making it the recommended approach for scaling Vega-Altair charts to large datasets.