What's new
Learn about the latest features, improvements and bug fixes in our product.
This page will always reflect the latest changes in the CARTO platform. Older release notes will be archived and are available in the left menu and the search bar.
September 7th, 2023
Improvement CARTO for Developers
Developers building applications with CARTO can now leverage their existing Single Sign-On (SSO) integration enabled in their organization to authenticate users.
Given the right setup, these applications will now be able to manage existing users and also first-time users coming from the SSO Identity Provider (IdP) that didn't exist previously in CARTO. The experience for these new users is seamless, without any action or step required. This is an extension of the Just-in-time provisioning setting available in CARTO Workspace.
The changes needed to fully leverage SSO and Just-in-time provisioning are covered:
September 5th, 2023
New Workflows
This will make premium and public datasets a lot easier to work with: just drag and drop your available samples or subscriptions to the canvas and start building your workflow.
With this new addition to Workflows, the largest catalog of curated geospatial datasets is readily available to be integrated with your cloud native analytical pipelines with just a few clicks. Check this new feature documentation here.
September 4th, 2023
New Builder
We're delighted to announce the next level of map description functionality in CARTO Builder: Richer map descriptions with support for Markdown. This upgrade takes our previous map description feature to a whole new level.
With the new richer map descriptions, you're not just adding text; you're crafting a more engaging user experience. The support for Markdown syntax allows you to include various text formats, headers, links, images, and even bullet-point lists, elevating the user's understanding and interaction with your map. To learn how to add Richer Map Descriptions to your maps, click here.
August 9th, 2023
New Builder
We're thrilled to unveil our newest addition to CARTO Builder - the Numeric SQL Parameter, expanding our portfolio of supported SQL parameter types. This innovative feature offers users enhanced interaction with numerical data within Builder.
Leveraging the Numeric SQL parameter, users can seamlessly retrieve single or pair numeric values from a Control UI to update the underlying data sources. It's an excellent option for those requiring to filter data by specific numeric ranges or adjusting analytical outputs based on numerical inputs.
August 7th, 2023
New Analytics Toolbox
We have added the new procedures CREATE_SPATIAL_SCORE and CREATE_SPATIAL_PERFORMANCE_SCORE in the Analytics Toolbox for BigQuery. With these new functions available in the cpg module, users are now able to generate more insights when analyzing a network of CPG merchants. It's now possible to create scores against business performance metrics or geospatial attributes and rank merchants to understand their performance and business suitability for the CPG brand. You can learn more on how to use these new functions by following this example on "Measuring merchant attractiveness and performance in CPG with spatial scores".
July 24th, 2023
New Workspace
We have added the possibility to control the visibility of Applications in CARTO through the usual sharing options (private, entire organization...), including the ability to share an application only with specific groups of users.
This is especially interesting to customize what applications are shown for each user in the CARTO Workspace depending on the groups that they belong to, and also to start developing applications privately, without the app shortcut being shown to other users. You will find more information for these use cases and other details in the Managing Applications section in this documentation.
July 20th, 2023
Improvement Workspace
Administrators in CARTO now have the possibility to automatically assign a role to their users based on the groups that they belong to. To do so, just enable this feature and map each group to a user role. For example, you can map the group
acme_data_analysts to get the editor role in CARTO, and new users belonging to that group will automatically get the editor role as well.This is a powerful approach to quickly onboard dozens or hundreds of users into CARTO while maintaining effortless and enterprise-grade controls over the privileges of each user. Learn more about mapping groups to user roles.
July 13th, 2023
New Workspace
Previously, whenever you created a BigQuery connection using OAuth ("Sign in with Google") it had to remain private, to prevent other users from impersonating your personal credentials.
With the addition of the new viewer credentials mode when sharing connections, we're unlocking several benefits for organizations using BigQuery:
- Instead of creating one connection per user, you can create just one connection and share it with everyone, with fewer management issues.
- By requiring viewer credentials, you can leverage row-level security and other policies set in your data warehouse.
July 6th, 2023
New Builder
We are thrilled to introduce the enhanced Search Location Bar, formerly known as the Address Search Bar. This feature now includes the ability to search for locations using coordinates. Simply input latitude and longitude values, and instantly visualize the corresponding location on the map.
Whether you're exploring remote areas, analyzing specific points of interest, or seeking valuable insights, our coordinate search feature empowers you to navigate with precision and seamlessly uncover new possibilities.
June 30th, 2023
New Workflows
We have just added a couple of new features in Workflows that are going to improve a lot the explainability of your multi-step analytical pipelines.
- Update nodes with more relevant and descriptive names.
June 30th, 2023
Improvement Workspace
Starting today, users with the ability to customize branding and appearance can also remove the CARTO brand and social icons from their public and embedded maps.
This is a setting that is applied to all maps created in the organization. Additionally, administrators can decide whether new users receive the generic CARTO onboarding materials, to further customize the experience for new users. Learn more about how to activate these customizations.
June 27th, 2023
New Builder
We are excited to introduce the latest enhancement to the Formula Widget in Builder, which allows users to create their own custom aggregation operations.
This new feature provides advanced capabilities for users to tailor calculations and derive precise insights from their data using SQL Expressions.
With custom aggregation operations, users have the flexibility to define calculations that align precisely with their unique analytical requirements. They can incorporate business-specific formulas and apply complex mathematical operations to single or multiple columns from their data source.
This level of customization empowers users to unlock valuable insights and perform advanced calculations that go beyond standard aggregations.
June 26th, 2023
New Workflows
While working with Workflows, in some occasions a component needs to be defined as a custom geography (point, line or polygon). This is currently the case with "Table from GeoJSON" but this tool will also be used in other components that might need a custom geospatial input.
We have developed a new tool, accessible through the "Draw features" button to define custom geographies as inputs for components.
This new tool come in quite handy in cases where one or more steps in an analysis have to be defined by a manual input, allowing faster prototyping a providing a much better user experience.
June 20th, 2023
Improvement Workspace
When importing geospatial data to a cloud data warehouse, one of the challenges is to select the correct data type for each of the columns in the file, also known as schema. And in most cases, CARTO automatically does the job for you, because we analyze a sample of the data and infer the data type from it.
For those cases where the automatic detection isn't exactly what you need, CARTO now allows you to manually defined the schema of the imported file, both through CARTO Workspace and Builder, and through our Imports API.
An example where this new feature is useful is when dealing with postal codes, that depending on the country could be automatically detected as numbers instead of strings — it doesn't make sense to calculate the average postal code.
To read more about how to select a custom schema in your imports, read our Importing data documentation.
June 14th, 2023
New Workflows
We have released a new batch of components in Workflows to keep increasing the possibilities and the value of this tool to enable the creation of data pipelines and spatial analyses for our users. The majority of components in this new batch are oriented towards providing more flexibility when manipulating and getting your data ready for the analysis. Here's the list of new components:
- Multi-Col Formula: it computes new values based on a given expression and a set of fields to apply the expression to;
- Multi-Row Formula: it creates a new table containing a new column computed using a multi-row formula based on one or several input columns;
- Find Replace: it finds a string in one column of a table and replaces it with the specified value from another table;
- Refactor columns: it refactors the columns in a table, allowing to change names and data types, and to select only certain columns from a table;
- Transpose: it rotates table columns into rows;
- Text to Columns: it adds new columns based on splitting the text string in a text column;
- Unique: it separates unique rows and duplicated rows;
- Row Number: it creates a new table with an additional column containing row numbers;
- Quadbin To Parent: it adds a new column named quadbin_parent with the value of the parent quadbin at a specific resolution;
- H3 To Parent: it adds a new column named h3_parent with the value of the parent h3 at a specific resolution;
- H3 KRing: it returns the neighboring indexes in all directions under the K distance size;
- H3 Distance: it computes the H3 grid distance between two H3 index column.
June 6th, 2023
New Analytics Toolbox
In the lds module of the last release of the Analytics Toolbox for BigQuery, Snowflake and Redshift we have now added the function to CREATE_ROUTES between given sets of origins and destinations (points) in a query, supporting different transportation modes and other advanced parameters. The function generates a new table with the columns of the input query plus a column with the resulting routes. Note that the routes are calculated by calling one of our external location data services providers. This functionality is also available from CARTO’s LDS API.
June 6th, 2023
New Analytics Toolbox
In the last release of the Analytics Toolbox for BigQuery we have available a new set of functions in order to perform space-time cluster analysis, for when data has both a spatial and a temporal component and you want to identify clusters looking at both dimensions at the same time (e.g. hotspots of demand for food delivery services in different periods of the day). Our implementation computes the space temporal Getis-Ord Gi* statistic for each area and timestamp according to the method described in this paper. This is supported now with two new functions in the statistics module of the toolbox, namely GETIS_ORD_SPACETIME_QUADBIN for quadbin indexes and GETIS_ORD_SPACETIME_H3 for H3 indexes.
May 16th, 2023
New Builder
Finding your current location on CARTO maps is finally possible. This feature is specially helpful when users require the map zoom in to their current position in a seamlessly manner to obtain insights from their surroundings.
This is how it works:
- 1.Click the Focus on User's Device Location button.
- 2.Enable Location Services on your browsers if required.
The map display zooms in to your current location and a blue icon indicates your position on the map.
May 8th, 2023
New Workspace
The CARTO Data Warehouse is a connection that comes pre-created for every CARTO organization, and it's fully managed by CARTO.
Until this release, it wasn't possible to manage the data available to this connection other than what was already available through Builder and Workflows.
Now, all users can introduce a Google account that they'll use to access the console. Once inside, you can run any SQL query, copy and edit existing tables or use other built-in features to import and migrate your data. Read more on how to get access to the CARTO Data Warehouse console.
May 5th, 2023
New Analytics Toolbox
Users of our Analytics Toolbox for Snowflake have now access to a new module named “statistics” offering functions to compute statistical measures on top of your spatial data. In this last release we have added support for computing the Moran’s I spatial autocorrelation and the Getis-ord Gi* statistics used for the identification of hotspots based on an input feature.
May 5th, 2023
New Analytics Toolbox
In this last release of the Analytics Toolbox for PostgreSQL, we have added a new module named “h3” with a set of functions providing users support for operating over the H3 spatial index. H3 is a multi-resolution hexagonal global grid system with hierarchical indexing developed by Uber, offering important benefits when performing spatial analytics at scale. To learn more about Spatial Indexes and H3 in particular, please have a look at our Spatial Indexes 101 report and our documentation.
May 5th, 2023
New Analytics Toolbox
Some areas due to their intrinsic characteristics or the data available are not suitable for running the predictive models given the large differences within the data used when training those models (e.g. training a model on big cities and then running predictions in areas of low population density). We have added new functions in the statistics module to allow users to compute the Area of Applicability (AOA) of a BigQuery ML model. It generates a metric which tells the user where the results from a Machine Learning (ML) model can be trusted when the predictions are extrapolated outside the training space (i.e. where the estimated cross-validation performance holds).
In the case of our Analytics Toolbox for BigQuery, this functionality is particularly useful when working with our BUILD_REVENUE_MODEL and PREDICT_REVENUE_AVERAGE procedures of the retail module.
April 24th, 2023
New Builder
SQL Parameters are placeholders that can be used on any SQL Query data source in Builder.
Once defined, the actual value for the parameter can be set through a control UI in the right side panel’s 'Parameters' tab. This allows to manipulate the actual SQL Query through an UI, by both Editor and Viewer users.
Among many different use cases, some applications for this new feature are:
- Create 'Text' or 'Dates' parameters.
- Reduce the size of a data source before rendering the map.
- Allow viewer users to define custom values in the data source in a controlled way.
- Use the same parameter in one or more queries.
- Filter a dataset before aggregating it to a spatial index grid (H3 or Quadbin).
April 21st, 2023
New Workspace
Developers looking to create geospatial applications at scale usually face an authentication challenge: how to build the application so that data is accessed in a granular and secure way. And there are different solutions depending on your needs: from static API Access Tokens for simple, public applications to dynamic authentication using the CARTO login (with or without Single Sign-On).
Today we're making the creation and management of API Access Tokens much simpler, with a complete user interface to create, edit and delete tokens.
API Access Tokens are now the recommended method to start working with CARTO for deck.gl and the CARTO APIs, and we've updated the documentation and API reference accordingly.
April 13th, 2023
New Workspace
CARTO is the ideal solution for geospatial visualization and analysis of large scale datasets, due to the scalability of the cloud data warehouses (eg: BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks...). However, dealing with such large datasets requires special attention into performance and optimizations.
Now, whenever we detect that one of your tables could perform better according to our performance considerations, we'll show a warning in Data Explorer and Builder, and you'll be able to take action immediately.
In just a few clicks, you'll overwrite or generate an optimized copy of your data, that will perform faster and save computing costs.
April 10th, 2023
New Workspace
We are adding two new features for admins to manage new users more easily and predictably:
- Default role for new users: Admins can now choose which role should be applied to new users, and by default it will be set to "viewers" following the least-privilege principle. Find more information about roles in CARTO and about this setting.
- SSO Just-in-time provisioning: Admins that have integrated their own SSO login can now decide whether new users will get additional questions when onboarding or not. If it's enabled, we'll just provision their user as soon as they login, without any needed step. This new setting has been included in the documentation about SSO at CARTO.
April 6th, 2023
New Builder
CARTO Builder now supports adding labels to point layers loaded via tiles, with a set of improved features:
- Support for primary and secondary label on each point.
- Now using a better typography, increasing readability.
- Collision control: Now labels are displayed in a way that they don’t collision with each other, adapting dynamically on each zoom level.
- Custom colors for the font and outline, allowing much better customization capabilities.
April 3th, 2023
New Analytics Toolbox
In this month's release of the Analytics Toolbox for BigQuery, we have published a new functionality that consists of a set of procedures within the statistics module to enable users to create spatial scores (also known as composite indicators or indexes) derived from a combination of different features. We have included 3 different procedures:
- CREATE_SPATIAL_COMPOSITE_SUPERVISED: to compute a spatial composite score as the residuals of a regression model which is used to detect areas of under- and over-prediction.
- CREATE_SPATIAL_COMPOSITE_UNSUPERVISED: to perform an aggregation of individual variables, scaled and weighted accordingly, into a spatial composite score.
- CRONBACH_ALPHA_COEFFICIENT: to measure the internal consistency of the variables used to derive the spatial composite score.
March 28th, 2023
Improvement Workspace
In order to give more flexibility to our users, we have removed a lot of the quotas that were feature-specific, such as maps, public maps, apps or connections, and we have replaced them with a combined usage metric, the Usage quota, that will be the main driver of consumption for all new customers through the CARTO platform.
The Usage quota is related to the number of successful API calls, excluding the metadata. Learn more about how it's calculated and how it applies to your subscription in our documentation.
Additionally, we have changed the way LDS credits are calculated. Before, they were monthly and separated by service: geocoding and isolines. Now, we've combined them into a single annual quota that results in more capacity and better flexibility.
March 14th, 2023
Improvement Workspace
Starting today, CARTO supports importing geospatial files through an Amazon Redshift connection leveraging the CARTO Import API.
With this new functionality, CARTO users working with Amazon Redshift will be able to quickly get their geospatial data ready for advanced analysis and visualization, from no-code tools like Builder or Workflows to geospatial development libraries such as CARTO for deck.gl.
Additionally, we are giving all customers the option to configure the AWS S3 Bucket used to import files (instead of the default bucket provided by CARTO in cloud instances).
March 7th, 2023
New Analytics Toolbox
In this month's release of the Analytics Toolbox for BigQuery, we have published a new functionality within the CPG module that allows our users to perform the merchant universe matching analysis in order to derive insights on market penetration and to identify expansion opportunities. With this analysis, CPG players can match their current universe of merchants/customers against the total universe of all potential ones on a given market, in order to identify in which merchants their products are still not present.
This analysis is performed with two new procedures in the Analytics Toolbox: UNIVERSE_MATCHING which performs a fuzzy match between two POI datasets based on location and name similarity, and UNIVERSE_MATCHING_REPORT that generates report-like tables summarizing market penetration insights.
March 3rd, 2023
New Builder
A set of new analyses have been added to Builder, to reach the same level of support on different data warehouses:
- Create buffers: Available now for Redshift and Snowflake connections.
- Intersect and aggregate: Available now for Snowflake connections.
- K-means clustering: Available now for Redshift and Snowflake connections.
Check the list of analyses available for each data warehouse and further documentation about each of them here.
February 24th, 2023
Beta Workflows
From today, users can start sharing workflows with the rest of users within their CARTO organization; who will then be able to open the shared workflow in view mode, and in the case of Editor users duplicate the workflow and edit the copied version as they wish.
Additionally, we have adapted the Workflows main page in the Workspace to allow searching workflows and managing the existing ones, in line with what’s available in the Maps section.
February 1st, 2023
Beta Workflows
From today, customers on Snowflake, Redshift and PostgreSQL have the possibility to use the public beta version of CARTO Workflows with data sources from their data warehouse connections. Note that CARTO Workflows is a new tool that enables users of all types and skill levels to harness the power of cloud data warehouses, spatial SQL, and advanced spatial analytics.
January 31st, 2023
Beta Analytics Toolbox
In the January 2023 release of the Analytics Toolbox for BigQuery, we have published a new and improved version of the
routing module. This new version includes procedures ROUTING_MATRIX to calculate origin-destination matrices and ROUTING_ISOLINES to compute isolines around a set of locations, both supporting multiple transportation modes (car, bike, and walk). These new functions run on top of CARTO’s road network (derived from OSM segments) that is available as a public subscription in the Data Observatory. Please note that these improvements imply breaking changes with the previous version of the routing module. To learn more about these new procedures please check our product documentation. We have also published a guide to illustrate how to benefit from this module of the Analytics Toolbox.
January 31st, 2023
Beta Analytics Toolbox
In the January 2023 release of the Analytics Toolbox for BigQuery, we have launched in beta our new
raster module. This feature offers a set of functions to operate with raster data natively in BigQuery, benefiting from the processing speeds and scalability of this data warehouse. Alongside the raster module in the Analytics Toolbox, we have also made available our Raster Loader, built in collaboration with Makepath. This publicly available Python library works as a tool for loading and optimizing GIS raster data into cloud-based data warehouses.
In order to learn more about this new module please check our product documentation. We have also published an example that illustrates how to use some of our functionality to combine raster and vector data to solve a spatial analysis.
.png?alt=media&token=013976f0-be13-48bd-ab55-b07f88293b15)
January 26th, 2023
New Workspace
Starting with this release, users that explore their CARTO Data Warehouse connection in Data Explorer will find two datasets (represented as folders) inside their organization data: private and shared.
The new dataset "private" is a unique dataset for each user, and all the tables and tilesets in this dataset will only be available to that user. Private datasets have a unique qualified name that identifies the user, extracted from their email.
The "shared" dataset will remain available to all the editor users in that organization. You can find all the documentation for this feature in the CARTO Data Warehouse documentation.
January 24th, 2023
Improvement Builder, Workspace
An important step of most processes in CARTO is to browse and select data sources and data locations:
- A future location to save results (eg: creating a tileset, importing data, running an enrichment...)
We have improved the user experience for these cases by adding a search bar that works at every level of your data, adding a new view: the list view, and adding breadcrumbs to help you navigate your data. The list view is similar to the one used in Data Explorer (including the search bar and breadcrumbs) and will now make the experience more consistent across the CARTO platform. If you would rather focus on the hierarchy of your data, the tree view is still available on the top right.
This is especially beneficial if you have a large number of projects/databases, schemas/datasets, or tables and tilesets: where previously you would need to scroll indefinitely, now you can perform a quick search.
January 23rd, 2023
New Builder
With this new feature, point layers can be transformed dynamically into an aggregated grid leveraging our Quadbin spatial index.
This produces a very significant increment in performance, but also allows aggregating data from the original features to make sure that all data is taken into consideration.
Some highlights:
- Available for all point tile layers from all data warehouses
- Implemented with pure SQL in our Maps API, no external dependencies such as the Analytics Toolbox or third-party libraries.
- It allows aggregating properties from the original points and also the number of points per cell.
- Inherits all the advantages and features of the previously existing Spatial Index layers.
- The aggregation happens transparently so no need to manually type any SQL code to aggregate the points.
January 18th, 2023
Beta Workflows
Today we are excited to announce that CARTO Workflows is now publicly available in beta with support for Google BigQuery and CARTO Data Warehouse. CARTO Workflows is a new tool that enables users of all types and skill levels to harness the power of cloud data warehouses, spatial SQL, and advanced spatial analytics.
CARTO Workflows provides a visual language to design and execute multi-step spatial analytics procedures, reducing the complexity and the high dependance on specialist knowledge to leverage the power of location intelligence. To learn more about this new development, please check our product documentation.
In the coming weeks we will add support to run CARTO Workflows on Snowflake, Redshift and PostgreSQL-based data warehouses, if you want to know more about that please contact us through our Support team.
January 18th, 2023
Improvement Documentation
Our documentation portal just got a new look and feel! This new layout should provide the following benefits:
- Cleaner look that uses more screen space if available
- A search bar to quickly find content
- All the documentation is organized and available on the left menu
- All pages now have an "On this page" index on the right sidebar __ to quickly locate sections
Hopefully, you'll have a better experience using this documentation. If you have any feedback about it, contact us through our Support team. We'll keep working on documentation improvements during the following weeks.
January 13th, 2023
New Builder
Collaborating on CARTO maps is finally possible, in asynchronous mode. This is helpful in setups such as production-ready maps, where the original owner might be out of the office; or in situations where the data, analysis, and cartography are each accomplished by different users. This is how it works:
- 1.The map owner first needs to enable collaboration for that map.
- 2.From that moment, all editors with access to the map will be able to edit it.
- 3.If two editors try to edit at the same time, the last one will be locked out, with the option of requesting to take over editing.
Happy collaboration!
Last modified 15d ago