As organizations scale their data teams, effective collaboration and a clear understanding of data lineage become essential. Hex, a collaborative data workspace, empowers data scientists and analysts to explore and visualize data in real-time. By integrating Hex with Secoda, teams can centralize all Hex projects, significantly improving visibility and governance.

This integration enables users to track and manage their Hex projects while gaining insights into their impact on data workflows, streamlining data management and enhancing visibility across teams.

What is Hex?

Hex is a powerful platform that helps data scientists and analysts write, run, and visualize SQL and Python code. With real-time collaboration and advanced sharing capabilities, Hex allows teams to work faster and more efficiently, whether they’re building dashboards, analyzing data, or sharing insights with stakeholders.

How Secoda integrates with Hex

Secoda’s integration with Hex allows teams to extract key information from Hex projects and surface it in Secoda’s centralized data catalog. This integration streamlines data workflows by consolidating project metadata, lineage, and collaboration metrics.

Here’s what Secoda extracts from Hex:

• Projects: Hex projects function as notebook-like environments where users can explore, analyze, and visualize data. Projects can include SQL, Python, or R cells, making them highly customizable and interactive.
• Project Details: Information such as the project title, description, and owner helps users identify each project’s purpose and responsibilities, promoting better collaboration.
• Project Categories (Tags): Projects can be tagged with statuses and categories, allowing teams to filter and organize projects effectively. This is particularly useful when managing a large number of projects or when certain projects fall under specific categories such as 'Finance' or 'Sales'​.
• Recent Activity: Tracking project engagement over the last 30 days helps teams prioritize attention toward active projects.
• Lifecycle Dates: Knowing when a project was created or last published provides visibility into how frequently projects are updated, aiding in project management.
• Lineage Tracking: One of the most valuable aspects of the integration is the end-to-end lineage tracking from Hex projects to source tables, such as those in Snowflake. Secoda visually represents the data flow, enhancing transparency and enabling better data governance.

Visibility and control over data workflows

The integration not only simplifies collaboration but also ensures that key project metrics and lineage are tracked effectively. This is essential as organizations increasingly rely on data pipelines and transformations to derive insights.

As noted by Rudy Rudolphi from Loop Returns:

“Hex is quickly becoming our primary internal BI tool, allowing us to move rapidly along with the ever-changing analytics landscape at Loop. The Hex integration in Secoda allows us to keep pace with that speed of development by putting all Hex app documentation at the fingertips of the Data Team and our stakeholders, removing the need for separate documentation pages and also giving us visibility into things like lineage, which make impact tracking much easier!”

End-to-end lineage from projects to source tables

One of the standout features of this integration is the ability to view end-to-end lineage for Hex projects. Secoda surfaces the data flow from Hex projects to their source tables, allowing teams to visualize how data is transformed and which datasets are being consumed by Hex projects.

With this level of visibility, data engineers and stakeholders can trace the origin of the data used in each analysis, ensuring transparency and trust in the data pipeline. By having both project-level details and lineage, teams can quickly understand the data journey from ingestion to insights, making it easier to troubleshoot issues, understand dependencies, and make informed decisions about data governance.

Enhanced data collaboration and governance

By integrating Hex with Secoda, teams benefit from centralized documentation and improved collaboration. Project metadata is no longer siloed within individual tools but is visible and accessible across teams. This integration also supports better governance by providing a single source of truth for Hex project details and lineage, helping teams comply with data governance policies and simplify decision-making.

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