Introducing Dataiku 5.1: Here's The Inside Scoop

Dataiku is always evolving and improving to better help our users, and the release of Dataiku 5.1 is no different, helping users collaborate and leverage data to drive success. 

We sat down with Thomas Cabrol, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Dataiku, to talk about what's new with Dataiku 5.1. He walked us through not only the exciting fresh features, but also a bit about what the development process looks like and how the team decides what features to work on.

Claire Carroll: First off, the big question: what's new in Dataiku 5.1? 

Thomas Cabrol: Dataiku 5.1 has a little something for everyone, with several major new features! We can group the updates into three main groups:

• First off, we've designed an enhanced experience for data scientists and data engineers who like to code a lot. Dataiku 5.1 offers deeper Git integration that streamlines the development of Plugins and code libraries (both for R and Python), the ability to code from outside of Dataiku with your IDE of choice (RStudio for R users for instance), a new type of “webapp” Plugins, and the ability to scale the execution of Jupyter Notebooks using Docker and Kubernetes.

• We also have a whole new set of features that will help our users implement custom data protection policies and regulations, with the introduction of our new GDPR Plugin. This includes the ability to flag datasets that contain personal information, create access permissions on top of this sensitive information, and audit data access.

• To round it out, we have broadly improved the user experience with more Flow usability ((un)folding branches), and a boosted user productivity, with the ability to copy/paste many types of objects, such as preparation scripts or scenarios steps, or to duplicate projects easily. 

CC: And with all these user experience improvements, will current users have a steep learning curve to adapt?

TC: Of course not! These new features are strong improvements over the current functionalities and will fit perfectly with how users already interact with Dataiku 5.0. In fact, many of these improvements have been requested by our users, and our UX and Product teams tested them with these users to make sure that Dataiku 5.1 offers a consistent experience with the previous versions. It’s straightforward to learn how to use and make the best of these new features, but we’ve also prepared a bunch of tutorial videos and documentation to help you through it. 

CC: How did you decide what to focus on with this release?

TC: For all Dataiku releases, our customers, partners, and users are the main drivers of our roadmap. We listen to the broader community to make sure each release has the necessary improvements and new features to support our users on their journey with Dataiku. And we are improving the process this year with a reinforced User Advocacy initiative, that will increase opportunities to engage with our end users, collect their ideas for new functionalities, and share best practices.

CC: What 5.1 feature excites you the most?

TC: As a data scientist and Dataiku user myself, I am very excited about the new “webapp” Plugins functionality. It opens up a whole new range of possibilities to create interactive data analytics or visualizations applications, fully tailored to the customer needs. Want to create a custom data labeling app for your deep learning model? No problem! Need to build an interactive time series visualization and forecasting application? Of course you can. Want to offer your users with a specific way to explore and analyze their datasets? You can do that, too!

No one has to go it alone; our users will be able to install Plugins written by Dataiku, create their own Plugins, or leverage Plugins contributed by the extended Dataiku community.

CC: Looking forward, what’s next for Dataiku?

TC: More of the same, really. We are continuing our effort to support users and organizations on their path to Enterprise AI by always improving the Dataiku and making it even more inclusive for any user.

And Dataiku is growing fast! We are opening a new office in Australia to make sure we are close to all our customers (or at least in the same time zone). If you are interested to join the adventure, check out our careers page!