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Using Explore

Explore is where questions get asked. You pick measures and dimensions and it builds the query.

Where to find it

Architect Panel → Dashboards:

  • Explore — the query screen

Architect Panel → Data:

  • Query Builder — where a question becomes a saved, reusable query

Asking a question

Choose what you are measuring, how you want it broken down, the period and any filters. Because the joins live in the semantic layer, a question spanning several datastores takes no more work than one over a single datastore.

You can select several measures at once, which is how you compare related figures — cases opened against cases closed, for instance — on one axis rather than in two charts nobody lines up correctly.

Drill down

An aggregate is the start of a question, not the end. Drilling into a figure to see what makes it up is usually where the actual answer is.

A total that looks wrong is very often one large item rather than a broad shift, and drill-down tells you which in seconds — whereas a chart alone will have you theorising for an afternoon.

Top-N

Where a dimension has many values, ask for the top few rather than all of them. A chart of every customer is unreadable; a chart of the top ten with the remainder grouped is a chart somebody can act on.

Compare periods

A single number rarely means much. This month against last, or against the same month last year, turns a figure into information.

Prefer year-on-year for anything seasonal. Comparing December with November tells you mostly about Christmas.

Worked example

A manager asks why complaints rose last month. In Explore they chart complaints by month with gap fill on, see the rise, then drill into the month by service. One service accounts for most of it. Drilling again by complaint reason shows a single reason dominating — a billing change made that month. Three clicks, no query written, and a cause rather than a number.

Save what proves useful

A question worth asking twice is worth saving in the Query Builder. It also means the next person asks the same question the same way rather than approximating it and getting a slightly different number.

Performance

Aggregating a long history is real work. Results are cached, so a repeated question is much faster than the first — but the first still has to run.

  • Narrow the period first. Most questions are about recent activity.
  • Reduce the number of groupings — each one multiplies the result set.
  • Check that dates and the columns you filter on are indexed.

Reconcile before circulating

Tie a new figure to something known before sending it anywhere — the trial balance, last month's figure from the old system, a manual count. A number that has never been checked is a hypothesis, and the first check should not happen in front of the board.

Recommendations

  • Drill before you conclude.
  • Use top-N on any dimension with more than about fifteen values.
  • Save and name good questions rather than rebuilding them.
  • Reconcile once, then trust it.