Changelog

Application scopes allow your client- or server-side app to access Propel resources. We’re now offering you greater control in restricting what an Application can or cannot do on your app’s behalf with OAuth 2.0 scopes.

Your app can request the following scopes:

• admin — The Application has read/write access to Data Sources, Data Pools, and Metrics within its Environment.
• metric:query — The Application can query Metrics within its Environment.
• metric:stats — The Application can query Metrics’ Dimension Statistics within its Environment.

When generating an access token for your app, you can choose which of these scopes to include. The example below uses curl to generate an access token with only the “metric:query” and “metric:stats” scopes. This ensures the generated access token can only query Metrics and Dimension Statistics, perfect for securing customer-facing apps.

curl https://auth.us-east-2.propeldata.com/oauth2/token \
  -d grant_type=client_credentials \
  -d client_id=$APPLICATION_ID \
  -d client_secret=$APPLICATION_SECRET \
  -d 'scope=metric:query metric:stats'

Applications can use any of the available scopes.

Business Metrics are based on aggregate data analysis. In some cases, you want to sum revenue for example. In other cases, you want to count the number of requests or count unique visitors for a given time range. In addition to Sum, Count, and Count Distinct Metric types, you can now define Min, Max and Average Metric types.

• Min - Selects the minimum value of the specified column for every record that matches the Metric Filters. For time series, it will select the minimum value for each time granularity.
• Max - Selects the maximum value of the specified column for every record that matches the Metric Filters. For time series, it will select the maximum value for each time granularity.
• Average - Averages the values of the specified column for every record that matches the Metric Filters. For time series, it will average the values for each time granularity.

• You can now reconnect a Data Source if a connection failed.
• You can now introspect tables in a Data Source to get the latest tables and schemas.
• You can now see the query activity on the Metric detail page.
• The Dashboard now shows top queries by Applications and Metrics.
• You can now see the unique values for a Metric Dimension.

Once a data set gets to a certain size, as engineers we often wonder, “What values do we actually have in there?” Answering this question can help us understand the correctness of our data, but it can also help us improve the product experience.

For example, if you want to filter on a numerical Dimension, wouldn’t it be great to build a slider with a min and max value? If you want to filter on a Dimension like “country,” wouldn’t it be great to build a dropdown with all the available countries in your Dimension?

Now, you can, with Dimension Statistics! When querying a Metric’s Dimensions, you can ask for stats and get the Dimension’s min, max, average, and uniqueValues:

query {
  metricByName (uniqueName: "My Metric") {
    dimensions {
      columnName
      stats {
        min
        max
        average
        uniqueValues
      }
    }
  }
}

In fact, we’re using this feature internally in the Console to show you unique values for all of your Dimensions here:

An animated screen capture of the Propel console, showing the “View unique values” feature for a Dimension named “AREA”, powered by Dimension Statistics. A scroll-able, modal window appears, showing all the values “AREA” can take on.

When syncing a data warehouse table to a Data Pool, you can now see the detailed Sync activity giving you complete operational visibility if something fails. For every Sync, you can see its status, whether it succeeded or failed, when it started, how many records were added, if there were any invalid records, and how long it took.

In addition to counters and time series, we now support leaderboard queries. Leaderboards are great for visualizing the “top N” of something, such as “the top 10 salespeople of the month” or “the top 100 events last year.” You can query it with a timeRange set of dimensions to group on, a sort order, filters, and a lowLimit. For example,

query {
  metricByName(uniqueName: "sales")  {
    leaderboard  ({
      timeRange: { relative: "THIS_MONTH" },
      dimensions: [{ columnName: "SALES_PERSON" }],
      rowLimit: 10
    }) {
      headers
      rows
    }
  }
}

The result you get back is an array of headers and an array of rows:

{
  "headers": ["SALES_PERSON", "SALES"],
  "rows": [
    ["Alice", "100"],
    ["Bob", "99"],
    ["Carol", "80"],
    ["Dave", "76"],
    ["Erin", "75"],
    ["Frank", "75"],
    ["Grace", "66"],
    ["Heidi", "63"],
    ["Ivan", "34"],
    ["Judy", "33"]
  ]
}

Perfect for piping into your favorite graph visualization library! For example, here we use ECharts to visualize a leaderboard from the state of California:

A screenshot of a leaderboard visualization. Rows are labeled with areas from the state of California and are sorted in descending order.

Sometimes you need to define Metrics with a subset of the data you have. For example, if you have a Metric like revenue, you’ll want to exclude all sales records where the type is “PROMOTION” or “TRIAL”.

You can now define Metrics with a subset of records of a Data Pool. When defining a Metric via the Console or API, you can create Metric Filters to include or exclude records from the Metric values. See below for an example where we define a Metric to sum up records where “AREA” equals “California”.

An animated screen capture of the Propel console, showing how to use Metric Filters to select a subset of records from a Data Pool.

Different products need to expose different Metrics to their end-users. For example, e-commerce products expose Sum Metrics like “Total Sales”, Count Metrics like “Number of orders”, and Count Distinct Metrics like “Unique visitors”.

When building in-product analytics, you can now define Sum, Count, or Count Distinct metrics for your product in a single place. Front-end engineers can access the Metric data with time series or counter queries using the Metrics API.

An animated screen capture of Propel’s GraphQL Explorer, showing how to query a Metric using the GraphQL API with various time granularities and filters.

You can now connect Propel to your Snowflake account. This connection lets you use your Snowflake data in your customer-facing web and mobile applications with Propel's GraphQL API. Propel manages all the caching, optimization, authorization, and API infrastructure so that your teams can focus on the product experience. The Snowflake Data Source is now available to all customers.

An animated screen capture of the Propel console, showing how to create a Data Source and the numerous checks that confirm the connection is working

Read the blog posts:​

• How to build in-product analytics with Snowflake and GraphQL
• How to build Snowflake data apps with GraphQL