Earlier this week, it was my turn to host a GitLab Group Conversation (a publicly live streamed Q&A on the GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel) on Meltano. I used the opportunity to share some updates about last month’s announcement of Meltano’s new strategy and direction and the response and impact so far.

If you’re curious, check out the presentation on Google Slides and the Q&A on YouTube. The presentation content can also be found on our blog.

Personally, I couldn’t be happier with how things have turned out so far, and I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has given Meltano a try, shared feedback from their experience, and contributed to the future of this open source ELT solution.

In conclusion, allow me to quote from the Slack conversation I had with GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij after he saw the presentation:

• Sid: great content, love the quotes on slide 3, these people really get what you’re doing.

• Douwe: Yep, and attracting a few dozen people who really get it, will stick with it, and will help make it happen is exactly what I was aiming for, so I’d call this a successful relaunch! 😁

Dive right in by following the examples on our homepage, or read on for further details and context.

If you've been following Meltano for a while or would like to have some historical context, start here: 

Revisiting the Meltano strategy: a return to our roots 

If you’re new to Meltano or are mostly interested in what’s coming, start here: 

Why we are building an open source platform for ELT pipelines

We're building this for you, and we literally won't be able to do it without you, so please give it a try and let us know what you think!

We squashed a number of bugs this week, and continue tweaking the interface to refine the UI and make Meltano simple and easy to use.

The team is also working hard to build a set of default dashboards for each new data connector, so it’s easy for anyone to have a great view of their business the moment they connect to a new data source.

Did You Know?

Meltano is completely open source - which means you can go look at the source code AND the work in progress through GitLab issues at any time!

Meltano on GitLab

New

• #1650 create TOS page and add TOS link to website footer

Changes

• #1681 Update transform during pipeline save to conditionally set skip vs. run to prevent wasted cycles for extractors that lack transformations

• #1696 Update dashboards list to be alphabetically sorted

• #1710 Hide tap-fastly in UI

Fixes

• #1696 Fix duplicate chart renders when dashboard is loaded

• #1696 Fix “Add to Dashboards” button when loading an existing report (additionally updated disabled button states)

• #1711 Disable fields of all kinds when a plugin setting is protected or set in env or meltano.yml

• #1712 Fix lock icon tooltip message on plugin settings that were set in env or meltano.yml

• #1677 Properly represent values of boolean settings that were set using environment variables in UI

Learn more about how you can get involved by reading our Contributor Guide and join the discussion in the public Meltano Slack community.

Try Meltano Now

The entire team is excited about this new functionality, and this first version is the beginning of an exciting path forward for sharing and embedding Meltano reports anywhere.

Embedding a report anywhere an iframe can render is simple – just click on the “Embed” drop down menu on any Meltano report, and then “Copy Snippet” to add the code to your clipboard.

<iframe src='https://meltano.meltanodata.com/-/embed/zE8NFH9P3YwFuX2QNpA4WycsuwePpUEHj9CW8ubIgwE' style='margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0; font-size: 100%; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; min-width: 500px; min-height: 400px;' />

The end result is a simple, beautiful graph that renders in any browser and automatically updates as your data updates.

The entire team is excited to hear what you think about embeddable graphs and reports, and as always, we’d love to hear about how we can improve Meltano.

Learn more about how you can get involved by reading our Contributor Guide and join the discussion in the public Meltano Slack community.

Try Meltano Now!

Dashboards Ready Out of the Box

The Meltano team continues to work on making the Meltano experience positive as soon as an account is created. This means making sure that each data connector has a solid set of default dashboards that are insightful and actionable, and which don’t take a ton of time to setup.

This week the team updated the default dashboards for Google Analytics, and work continues on building a great set of dashboards for our new Facebook Ads extractor.

Try Meltano for Free

As part of our effort to work closer with users, we’ll setup a hosted Meltano instance for free, and help you get connected to the services most important to your business.

Try Meltano for Free

What shipped on January 27th and 29th

Contributions & Cadence

Thank you to all our contributors, both inside GitLab and across the broader open source community for Meltano. Learn more about how you can get involved by reading our Contributor Guide and join the discussion in the public Meltano Slack community.

New

• #1462 User will be able to reorder dashboard reports

• #1482 Add future grants and revocations for schemas, tables, and views for roles in the meltano permissions command

• #1376 Add last updated date to reports

• #1409 Add data start date to Analysis page

• #1241 Add dashboard plugin type to enable bundling curated reports and dashboards for data sources

• #1241 Add --include-related flag to meltano add and meltano install to automatically install related plugins based on namespace

• #1241 Add default dashboard and reports for Google Analytics

Changes

• #1481 Add table and view revocations for roles in the meltano permissions command

• #1459 Users can no longer install tap-carbon-intensity from the UI

• #1625 Update docs on meltano.com to only include extractors and loaders provided in the hosted version of Meltano.

• #1590 Add additional targets to dbt clean

Fixes

• #1600 Fix tooltip for Data Source “Connect” buttons

• #1605 Fix an infinite loop causing extraneous API calls to the configuration endpoint

• #1561 Fix onFocusInput() to properly focus-and-auto-scroll to <input type='file'>s in the data source docs UI

• #1561 Fix <input type='file'> styling to better accommodate flexible widths

• #1618 Fix an issue where an expired session would not redirect to the Login page

• #1630 Fix an integrations setup bug that prevented subsequent pipelines to be created unless a full page refresh occurred