Q1 2023
New features and improvements introduced from January to March 2023
Introducing a new Usage quota and a new Location Data Services credits system
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.
Importing geospatial files into Amazon Redshift using CARTO
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).
Merchant universe matching analysis to understand market penetration for CPG players available in the Analytics Toolbox for BigQuery
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.
New Builder SQL Analyses available for Redshift and Snowflake connections
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.
Enabling users to share workflows with their organization
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.
CARTO Workflows in public beta now with support for Snowflake, Redshift and PostgreSQL
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.
To learn more about this new development, please check our product documentation.
New functions to generate routing matrices and isolines natively in BigQuery
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.
Adding raster support in BigQuery with a new module in 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.
New space for private data available for every user in the CARTO Data Warehouse
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.
Search, list view and breadcrumbs when browsing your data in Builder and Workspace
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 data source (eg: adding a source in Builder, using a SQL Analysis...)
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.
Dynamic aggregation of point layers into Quadbin grids
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.
CARTO Workflows in public beta with support for Google BigQuery and CARTO Data Warehouse
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.
New documentation layout
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.
Multiple editor users working on the same map
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:
The map owner first needs to enable collaboration for that map.
From that moment, all editors with access to the map will be able to edit it.
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!
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