Features

Today we're announcing permissioning, a new feature that will give our customers more granular control over what their teammates can and can't do with Chart.io.

With permissioning, Chart.io project administrators can now assign teammates to one of three roles:

Admin

Admin users can do, well, everything. That includes creating dashboards, adding datasources, determining access for other users -- basically anything that's possible with Chart.io.

Creator

Creators have a medium level of access. They can add new charts, modify existing ones, edit schema and add new dashboards. But unlike admins, they can't add new datasources ...

Yesterday may have been a holiday, but we sure haven't been resting here at Chart.io. In fact, we spent a good chunk of the summer squashing bugs and streamlining our code to make Chart.io faster and more stable than ever.

Some improvements you might notice right away, while others reside under the hood. Highlights include:

• Design unification. We've made interface tweaks throughout the site to ensure a consistent look and feel.

• Better error handling. We've greatly improved our inline error reporting, showing you details about snafus like SQL errors as they happen, so you can ...

At Chart.io, we really like rocking Tornado as part of our stack. Tornado makes writing python web apps easy and straightforward to understand. Chartio's architecture, however, requires connecting to MySQL database servers and executing long-running queries against them. This is the sort of thing that the current MySQL driver chokes on in a Tornado setup -- SQL queries block until the results are retrieved. While this isn't a big deal in nearly all production environments (you want to know when your database gets slow, so you can optimize queries or add indexing), it matters a lot to us ...

Because we take security extremely seriously, we re-engineered the way our customers connect their data to the Chart.io engine. We created a new connection client to Chart.io, which is super secure. In this approach, you run a standard SSH client on your end that connects to one of Chart.io's servers. Chartio then connects to your database using this private tunnel.

This is great for many reasons

1. Any communications between chartio and your server is encrypted using the strongest encryption available.
2. You do not have to expose an external port to the network. We can use the ...

Would you believe me if I said one of our most recent additions to the Chart.io team was featured in 20/20 with John Stossel? I wouldn't either. But, alas, it's true. His web app, Tank on Empty, which helps motorists figure out exactly how many miles they can go once the gas light in their car turns on, got quite the buzz. For proof, check this out. While Tank on Empty was quite the hit, the engineering mind behind it has done and plans to do so many more awesome things.

Justin received his BS in ...

Analytic queries tend to take a long time to run. They typically aggregate over thousands or millions of rows and databases are rarely indexed properly for the infrequently executed queries. But at Chart.io, we don't think that's a good excuse for your charts or dashboard to load slowly.

So today we're introducing a new feature: caching! Now, every time you look at your charts, the data collected for that chart will be saved in your local browser, and the next time you visit your dashboard it will show the old saved results until the new fresh ...

Chart.io has a ton of powerful features. Here's a quick walkthrough. If you have any more questions, please email help@chart.io.

1. "Split by" Field

Use this field to split any column by other columns. Here are a few examples:

A. Split new user signups by payment method B. Split active users by gender C. Split purchases by shipment method

1. Filter

First click on "Add a filter" in the right hand side of the dataset. Then, it should look like this

With filters, you can specify tons and tons of stuff. Here are a few examples:

A. See ...

Today was just another regular ol' day at the office until our geek alarm went off, announcing one of the more momentous days of the year. That's right, you guessed it - Pi Day!

The magical number was first rigorously estimated by Archimedes a long, long time ago (possibly during the days of Lotus 123-no one knows for sure). Fast forward to the present, and we're honoring this awesome number with one of our own creations-the cool new Pie Chart.

Pie Charts, hmmm....you might be thinking, isn't that like the Comic Sans of data visualization (or the ...

Databases are generally not built to be used or easily read by the lay person. They're designed by and for engineers with very cryptic table and column names like "so_posts.post_type_id" that have a lot of meaning to the creators but don't make a lot of sense to anyone else (think fortune cookies).

So even if you know SQL, you often have to go to the original engineer to find out where exactly the data you're looking for is located. And if you don't know SQL, well...

First I'd like to announce that we at chart.io have made a new years resolution to blog more (weekly), especially about the features we frequently roll out. Its really easy to get excited and just jump into working on the next set of features and functionality after releasing one, but we're going to do a better job of taking the time in between to let you know about it. What's the point of the feature after all if only a few people know its there?! Or, if a feature is released in the woods without a ...