DSS 4.1 Release notes¶

Migration notes ¶

Migration paths to DSS 4.1 ¶

From DSS 4.0: Automatic migration is supported, with the restrictions and warnings described in Limitations and warnings

From DSS 3.1: In addition to the restrictions and warnings described in Limitations and warnings, you need to pay attention to the restrictions and warnings applying to your previous versions. See 3.1 -> 4.0

From DSS 3.0: In addition to the restrictions and warnings described in Limitations and warnings, you need to pay attention to the restrictions and warnings applying your previous versions. See 3.0 -> 3.1 and 3.1 -> 4.0

From DSS 2.X: In addition to the restrictions and warnings described in Limitations and warnings, you need to pay attention to the restrictions and warnings applying to your previous versions: see 2.0 -> 2.1 2.1 -> 2.2 2.2 -> 2.3, 2.3 -> 3.0, 3.0 -> 3.1 and 3.1 -> 4.0

Migration from DSS 1.X is not supported. You must first upgrade to 2.0. See DSS 2.0 Relase notes

How to upgrade ¶

It is strongly recommended that you perform a full backup of your DSS data directory prior to starting the upgrade procedure.

For automatic upgrade information, see Upgrading a DSS instance.

Pay attention to the warnings described in Limitations and warnings.

Limitations and warnings ¶

DSS 4.1 is a major release, which changes some underlying workings of DSS. Automatic migration from previous versions is supported, but there are a few points that need manual attention.

SSH datasets ¶

If a SSH dataset had an absolute path, the migrated download recipe may fail to locate files. You will need to adjust the path in the connection versus the path in the dataset.

API node ¶

If you had custom pooling configuration, please contact Dataiku Support for update instructions

Other ¶

Models trained with prior versions of DSS must be retrained when upgrading to 4.1 (usual limitations on retraining models and regenerating API node packages - see Upgrading a DSS instance). This includes models deployed to the flow (re-run the training recipe), models in analysis (retrain them before deploying) and API package models (retrain the flow saved model and build a new package)
After installation of the new version, R setup must be replayed
We now recommend using mainly personal API keys for external applications controlling DSS, rather than project or global keys. Some operations, like creating datasets or recipes, are not always possible using non-personal API keys.
DSS 4.1 is compatible with Anaconda/Miniconda version 4.3.27 or later only. If your existing DSS instance is integrated with Anaconda Python, you should check your current conda version with conda -V, and if necessary upgrade your conda installation with conda update conda.

External libraries upgrades ¶

Several external libraries bundled with DSS have been bumped to major revisions. Some of these libraries include some backwards-incompatible changes. You might need to upgrade your code.

Notable upgrades:

pandas 0.18 -> 0.20
scikit-learn 0.18 -> 0.19

As usual, remember that you should not change the version of Python libraries bundled with DSS. Instead, use Code environments

Version 4.1.5 - February, 13th 2018 ¶

DSS 4.1.5 is a bugfix release.

Notebooks ¶

Fixed notebooks when a python/lib is defined at the project level

Misc ¶

Fixed impersonation failure of YARN jobs in multi-user-security mode with resourcemanager failover

Version 4.1.4 - February, 8th 2018 ¶

DSS 4.1.4 is a bugfix release.

Datasets ¶

Fixed copy action of Vertica dataset
Fixed metric computation on MongoDB dataset
Fixed build failure on exposed HDFS datasets if target project does not exist in multi-user-security mode

Web apps ¶

Fixed export/import of published webapps created after DSS 4.1

Recipes ¶

Fixed special characters management on ‘contains’ and ‘like’ operators on SQLServer and Oracle
Fixed window and group recipe schema overriding when a post filter is defined
Fixed split recipe from partitioned filesystem dataset to partitioned SQL dataset
Fixed insert table helper on SQL script recipe.

Machine learning ¶

Fixed UI of clustering scoring recipe
Custom variable and current project key are now accessible from custom python model
Fixed small differences between mllib and scikit-learn metrics

Notebooks ¶

Fixed PySpark notebooks on YARN using virtual environments
Fixed usage of project level lib/python in notebooks in multi-user-security mode

Misc ¶

New feature: Support conda 4.4
New feature: Added ability to disable exports. See Advanced security options
Macro admin parameters are now settable in the scenario UI
Fixed possible issue with loading webapp insights
Fixed custom python trigger in multi-users-securit mode
Fixed display issue when RMarkdown reports are slow to generate
Fixed ‘add to scenario’ action of managed folders
Fixed folder scroll on large managed folders

Version 4.1.3 - January, 8th 2018 ¶

DSS 4.1.3 is a bugfix release.

Datasets ¶

Fixed SQL Query dataset on Teradata when the query contains unaliased expressions
Fixed GCS and Azure Blob Storage datasets when a bucket is forced in connection
Fixed dates reading bug in Parquet, whereby reading dates in year 0 would cause subsequent dates to appear as negative
Fixed metrics on Twitter dataset

Machine Learning ¶

Fixed failure of Python ensembles, that could not be used for scoring before having retrained them
Fixed training and evaluation failure of Python ensembles when target contained missing values
Fixed incorrect “raw” coefficients in linear models
Fixed wrongful binary classification metrics in evaluation recipe
Fixed failure in feature reduction by correlation to target when there are categorical variables with imputation of missing values
Fixed failure writing date columns in clustering recipe
Fixed computation issue in “difference to parent” in interactive clustering
Fixed sort by “difference to parent” in interactive clustering
Added more details about algorithms in results pages
Added warning when number of selected models can lead to ties for voting classifier ensembles.
Made dataiku.current_project_key() API usable in custom models
Updated Sparkling Water to 2.0.21 / 2.1.20 / 2.2.6

Data preparation ¶

Added ability to remove outliers on dates
Added Column completion in “Compute distance” processor
Improved documentation links for reshaping processors
Open processors documentation in a new tab
Misc small UI improvements

Recipes ¶

Don’t allow Spark and MR engines for partition redispatch
Fixed UI of postfilter with incorrect formula
Fixed custom aggregates in Pivot recipe
Window recipe on DSS engine: fixed non-dense rank within group
Window recipe on DSS engine: fixed negative window limits
Misc small UI improvements
Fixed occasional failure while retrieving Spark failure

Coding ¶

Fixed “write_metadata” and “create_meaning” Python APIs
Fixed failure to create some templates in plugins

Web apps ¶

Don’t lose Python backend code when disabling backend.
Fixed issues with Shiny apps when DSS is behind a HTTPS reverse proxy

Automation ¶

Fixed display issue in “Dataset modified” trigger
Fixed deadlock when aborting a scenario when aborted build step was run from a python step
Don’t complain when no partition is selected in “Compute Metrics” step (means all partitions)

Misc ¶

All modals now have a “temporarily hide” button to view the Flow underneath
Fixed support link in error messages
Fixed failure saving very long project variables
Fixed migration issue for code envs in multi-user-security mode

Version 4.1.2 - December, 12th 2017 ¶

DSS 4.1.2 contains both bug fixes and new features. For the list of new features in the 4.1 branch, see release notes for 4.1.0 below

Machine learning ¶

New feature: Support for numerical vectors as input feature in Visual Machine Learning
Percentage display in confusion matrix
New performance-oriented options for MLLib
Fixed display of cross-validation chart for regresison models when K-fold cross test is enabled

Data preparation ¶

New feature: Stop words and stemming for German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch languages

API node ¶

New feature: New UI to define test queries and data enrichments for API node.
Fixed intermittent failures of R function and R prediction endpoints when left idle
Fixed dataset lookup endpoint mode hanging after several queries

Flow ¶

New feature: Ability to define maximum parallelism per recipe, recipe type, user, … (See Limiting Concurrent Executions)
Fixed rectangular selection and dragging on Safari
Fixed copy of parts of Flow with “All available” partition dependency
Fixed “New recipe” menu when more than ~30 plugins are installed

Automation ¶

Fixed wrongful display of some jobs as being “initiated by a scenario” whereas they were not. This could also cause leakage of backend log lines in scenario logs.

Dashboard ¶

Fix issue whereby sometimes, users couldn’t view web apps they were allowed to
Fixed display of static insights with spaces in names

Visual recipes ¶

Fixed split recipe in “Fully random dispatch” mode on Hive and Spark
Fixed UI for “equals to a date” filtering
Fixed support on Greenplum
Fix array contains operator on DSS engine

Coding ¶

Fixed “clear” API on managed folders
Fixed partitioned Pig recipe
Fixed creation of notebook templates in plugin developer

Hadoop & Spark ¶

Allow Kerberos+SSL when using the Cloudera driver for Impala
Fixed support for Hadoop without any kind of Hive support

Misc ¶

New feature: Support for per-user-credentials together with LDAP authentication on Teradata
Performance improvements for large deployments
Don’t let users enter empty project names
Fixed hang of custom datasets “Test & Get Schema”
Faster explore of partitioned SQL datasets
Allow pre- and post- queries in SQL query dataset
Fixed possible interface unresponsiveness when validating a coding recipe with “all available” partitioning, and unresponsive data source
Allow Markdown in plugins description
Various error display improvements
Fix usage of templates in plugins

Version 4.1.1 - November, 20th 2017 ¶

DSS 4.1.1 is a bugfix release. For the list of new features in the 4.1 branch, see release notes for 4.1.0 below

Datasets ¶

Fixed errors when using HTTP datasets as inputs of some visual recipes
Fixed spurious warning when creating an editable dataset
Improved error handling when creating new managed datasets
Added experimental support for “autocommit” execution on Microsoft SQL Server
Fixed write support in custom Python datasets

Recipes ¶

Fixed handling of partitioned inputs in pivot recipe
Fixed handling of partitioned outputs in split recipe with Hive engine

Hadoop & Spark ¶

Fixed reading of partitioned Parquet HDFS datasets in Spark notebook
Fixed validation of partitioned SparkSQL recipe with Parquet HDFS inputs
Fixed failure to synchronize Hive metastore after manual clear of dataset
Fixed some buggy cases in Spark pipelines building
Added default setting for better out-of-the-box experience on MUS with Spark 2.2

Data preparation ¶

Better formatting of dates in analyze histogram

Machine learning ¶

Fixed computation of score for multiclass when not all classes are in test set
Fixed selectability of models in saved model versions list
Fix evaluate recipe in multiclass when evaluating rows with target not seen at training.

Flow and jobs ¶

Fixed schema propagation across Hive recipes in HiveServer2 execution mode
Performance enhancements in job details page

Misc ¶

Fixed migration of scenarios with attached datasets in reporters
Fixed UI issues in tags edition on Firefox
Fixed color scale for binned XY charts
Exclude non-writable plugin datasets from project exports
Fixed memory and socket leak in jobs building

Version 4.1.0 - November, 13th 2017 ¶

DSS 4.1.0 is a major upgrade to DSS with a lot of new features. For a summary of the major new features, see: https://www.dataiku.com/learn/whatsnew

New features ¶

For coders: Multiple code environments for Python and R ¶

DSS now allows you to create an arbitrary number of code environments. A code environment is a standalone and self-contained environment to run Python or R code.

Each code environment has its own set of packages. Environments are independent: you can install different packages or different versions of packages in different environments without interaction between them. In the case of Python environments, each environment may also use its own version of Python. You can for example have one environment running Python 2.7 and one running Python 3.6

See Code environments for more information.

For coders: Python 3 support ¶

As a consequence of the multiple code environments support, you can now run Python 3 (3.4 to 3.6) for all your DSS code.

For coders: Shiny and Bokeh ¶

You can now write web applications in DSS using the Shiny and Bokeh libraries that are fully natively integrated.

A Shiny web app uses the Shiny <https://shiny.rstudio.com/> R library. You write R code, both for the “server” part and “frontend” part. Using Shiny, it is easy to create interactive web apps that react to user input, without having to write any CSS or Javascript.

You write your Shiny code as you would outside of DSS, and DSS takes care of hosting your webapp and making it available to users with access to your data project.

A Bokeh web app uses the Bokeh <http://bokeh.pydata.org/en/latest/> Python library. You write Python code, both for the “server” part and “frontend” part. Using Bokeh, it is easy to create interactive web apps that react to user input, without having to write any CSS or Javascript (Bokeh is the Python counterpart to Shiny).

You write your Bokeh code as you would outside of DSS, and DSS takes care of hosting your webapp and making it available to users with access to your data project.

Mass actions and view on the Flow ¶

The UI capabilities of the DSS Flow have been strongly boosted.

You can now:

Select multiple items (using Shift+Click, or using rectangular selections)
Apply a large number of mass actions on multiple items , like: * Delete * Clear * Build * Add to a scenario * Change engines * Change Spark configurations * Change tags * Change dataset types and connections * …
View items in the Flow using a variety of inspection layers, like: * By connection * By recipe engine * By partitioning scheme * By creation/modification date or author * By Spark configuration * …
Copy entire parts of the Flow, either within a project or between projects

Filtering on the Flow ¶

In addition to the above mentioned mass actions capabilities, you can now filter the flow view by tags, users, types and modification dates. This allows you to focus on your part of the Flow while not being distracted by the rest of the Flow, and is particularly useful for large projects.

For coders: RMarkdown ¶

Code reports allow you to write code that will be rendered as beautiful reports that you can download, attach by mail or render on the dashboard. R Markdown reports can be used to generate documents based on your project’s data.

R Markdown is an extension of the markdown language that enable you to easily mix formatted text with code written in several languages (in particular R or Python).

When editing your R Markdown report in DSS, you can “build” it to generate the output document. This document can be displayed, published into the dashboard, downloaded in various document formats, or attached to emails.

See Code reports for more information.

For coders: custom charts on the dashboard ¶

Through the new “static insights” mechanism, it is now possible to easily display on the DSS dashboard charts or other arbitrary files produced using Python or R code directly on the DSS dashboard.

See static insights in Python and static insights in R

This notably includes charts created with:

For data scientists: Auto-ML features ¶

The capabilities of DSS to automatically optimize machine learning models have been greatly improved:

Real-time models comparison charts to see the progress of your grid search optimization
Support for random search
Time-boundable search
Interruptible and resumable search
Plot the impact of any hyperparameter on the model’s performance and training time

Many more parameters can now be optimized in all algorithms.

More support has been added for custom cross-validation strategies. Code samples are available for one-click setup of LeaveOneOut / LeavePOut strategies.

The UI has been overhauled to make it clearer how to try more parameters, and to better document various options.

For data scientists: Grid search in MLLib models ¶

DSS previously had support for hyperparameters optimization for Python (in-memory) models. This capability has been extended to MLLib models.

For data scientists: Ensemble models ¶

You can now select multiple models and create an ensemble model out of them.

Ensembling can be done using:

Linear stacking (for regression models) or logistic stacking (for classification problems)
Prediction averaging or median (for regression problems)
Majority voting (for classification problems)

For analysts: Pivot recipe ¶

The pivot recipe lets you build pivot tables, with advanced control over the rows, columns and aggregations. It supports execution of the pivot on external systems, like SQL databases, Spark, Hive or Impala.

The pivot recipe supports advanced features like limiting the number of pivoted columns, multi-key pivot, …

See Pivot recipe for more information.

For analysts: Sort recipe ¶

For analysts: New “Split” recipe ¶

For analysts: Distinct recipe ¶

For analysts: “Top N” recipe ¶

The “Top N” recipe allows you to retrieve the first and last N rows of subsets with the same grouping keys values. The rows within a subset are ordered by the columns you specify. It can be performed on any dataset in DSS, whether it’s a SQL dataset or not.

See Top N: retrieve first N rows for more information

R models in API node ¶

You can now write custom model predictions in R and expose them on the DSS API node. DSS will automatically handle deployment, distribution, high availability and scalability of your R model, written using any R package

See Exposing a R prediction model for more information

Arbitrary Python or R functions in the API node ¶

In addition to custom prediction models in Python or R, you can now expose arbitrary functions in the DSS API node. DSS will automatically handle deployment, distribution, high availability and scalability of your functions.

See Exposing a Python function and Exposing a R function for more information

SQL queries in the API node ¶

You can expose a parametrized SQL query as a DSS API node endpoint. Calling the endpoint with a set of parameters will execute the SQL query with these parameters.

The DSS API node automatically handles pooling connections to the database, high availability and scalability for execution of your query.

See Exposing a SQL query for more information

Datasets lookup in the API node ¶

The “dataset(s) lookup” endpoint offers an API for searching records in a DSS dataset by looking it up using lookup keys.

For example, if you have a “customers” dataset in DSS, you can expose a “dataset lookup” endpoint where you can pass in the email address and retrieve other columns from the matching customer.

See Exposing a lookup in a dataset for more information

Index external tables in DSS catalog ¶

It is now possible to scan and index DSS connections. The DSS catalog will then contain items for every table in the remote connection. You can search tables by connection, schema, name, columns, descriptions, … You can preview tables, see if they are already imported as DSS datasets, and import them easily.

Folders and uploads everywhere ¶

Managed folders and uploaded datasets can now be stored on any “files-aware” location supported by DSS (local filesystem, HDFS, S3, GCS, Azure Blob, FTP, SFTP).

New HTTP / FTP / SCP / SFTP support ¶

The support for these protocols has been completely overhauled:

The old cache can now be completely bypassed.
You can now use the Download recipe to cache files from a remote location to another location (which can be local or remote)
SFTP datasets are now writable

New chart features ¶

DSS 4.1 comes with several major improvements to the data visualization features:

Ability to create animated charts, animated by another dimension
Ability to create “sub-charts”, broken down by another dimension
More control on legend position, legend for continuous colors
Support for displaying geometry directly on maps
Customizable color palettes
Diverging color palettes
Customizable map backgrounds
Compute charts using Hive

Attach more things to scenario emails ¶

In DSS scenarios you can send email reports at the end of a scenario.

You can now attach to these email reports multiple items:

The data of a dataset, in any format supported by DSS format exporters
A file from a managed folder
The full content of a managed folder
An export of a RMarkdown report
An export of a Jupyter noteboook
The log file of the scenario

A mail can have multiple attachments.

Other notable enhancements ¶

Edit recipes in notebook ¶

You can now easily edit a Python or R recipe (regular or Spark) in a Jupyter notebook, and go back to the recipe from the notebook/

Code editor enhancements ¶

In all places where you can edit code in DSS, you can now:

Customize the theme of the code editor (go to your user profile)
Customize font and font size
Customize some key mappings

In addition, code editors now support many more features:

Code folding
Auto close of brackets and tags
Multiple cursors

Until now, an empty SQL dataset (table exists but has 0 rows, or SQL query returns 0 rows) was considered: as “not ready” and could not be used in the Flow. This is now a configurable dataset.

Native TDCH support ¶

DSS includes TDCH support in the sync recipe for fast transfers:

Teradata to HDFS
HDFS to Teradata

This includes interaction with other Hadoop Filesystems, as HDFS datasets (S3, …)

Plugins ¶

Plugins can now contain “FS providers” to define new kinds of “file-aware” datasets and managed folders
Plugins can now contain templates for webapps and code reports
Plugins can now contain custom palettes and map backgrounds for charts

Misc (datasets)¶

DSS has beta support for IBM DB2.
DSS has beta support for Exasol
You can now check schema consistency on all files in a dataset
Relocation settings are now available for many more types of datasets
Checking if a SQL query dataset is ready is now much faster
Uploaded datasets can now be partitioned
Improved error and status reporting in datasets screens

Misc (webapps)¶

Improvements in the webapps mechanism make it more robust to copy a project containing a webapp within a DSS instance

Misc (recipes)¶

You won’t get prompted to update the schema anymore of an output dataset when it’s empty (happens automatically)

Misc (charts)¶

Added support for filter by date in SQL Server
Ability to reorder charts
Option not to replace missing values by 0 (notably in line charts)

Misc (data preparation)¶

Columns of integers containing 0-leading values will now be considered as Text
When both integer and decimal are possible, but some values are not valid integers, DSS will now properly choose decimal
Forced meanings are better preserved across preparation recipes, fixing some invalid “switch to numeric” behaviors

Misc (administration)¶

Connections are not tested automatically anymore, avoiding cases where you could get locked out for using a wrong password
The DSS temporary directories have been cleaned up to make it easier to understand what takes some space

Notable bug fixes ¶

Datasets ¶

You can now download multiple files in a HTTP dataset
HTTP dataset now supports SSL SNI
Other stability fixes for HTTP datasets
Fixed intermittent “Address already in use” issue with custom Python datasets

Recipes ¶

Preferred engine is now taken into account for split, filter and sync recipe

Automation ¶

Fixed setting global variables from a custom scenario Python step
Fixed Scenario.get_definition() in Python API client