The Combine tool already included anchors for the left, inner and right data streams (left and right being the anti joins). However, oftentimes you want the left+inner or right+inner data sets (i.e. the left and right data sets combined with the inner data set). To support this, we’ve introduced new anchors for the left+inner and right+inner data sets.

We also released four new destinations: Google Sheets, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Clickhouse.

The Google Sheet Source now supports native authentication and selection of sheets from Google Sheets. You can select multiple files and multiple sheets within each file.

Similarly, the File Source now supports multiple files at once. It supports CSV, Excel and Parquet files. We automatically detect the file type and the schema of the file, but you can select columns, rows to skip, and more.

The major improvement in this release is optimizing load performance. This should make your experience smoother and faster. We’re below 100ms now for most pages.

In parallel, we released a number of new features and bug fixes.

This is a major improvement to the structure of our Sources and will help you to get more data into Less. This release includes updates to Snowflake, MySQL, PostgreSQL, HiBob, Sharepoint and more.

1. Removed the row limit on the Input and Limit tool of 1.000.000 rows.
2. Fixed that the “Stop process” on the Canvas doesn’t show an “out of resources” error when the session is temporarily stopped
3. Fixed an unhandled error that would occur when deleting permissions from an asset that you would then no longer have access to.
4. Removed the “undefined” from Tool annotations before configuring them
5. Added optional default schema for Snowflake Destinations and Sources
6. Fixed a wrong error message when deleting assets you don’t have the right to delete (only applicable to multi-deleting)
7. Ensured that the root folder is always present in the breadcrumbs

Though we haven’t introduced any headline features, we’ve addressed numerous smaller issues and improvements that collectively deliver a more refined user experience.

1. Improved the Group tool so it now auto-expands when you add multiple tools to it
2. We opened the permission modal for all on Folders to view granular permissions
3. Added more information on the permission tooltip to include the relevant groups and their roles
4. Added an improved visual cue for the when jobs have no logs
5. Better styling for response message from Snowflake on the Snowflake Destination
6. Added the instance size to job log items
7. Added support for duplicating assets
8. Removed the option to delete default roles (Manager, Editor, Viewer)
9. Fixed that reset filters did not function as expected on the datagrid
10. Added support for moving assets to the root folder

We invested a lot of time trying to balance flexibility and ease of use when it comes to our permission structure. This is a work in progress and we’ll continue to refine it over time. With this release, we removed the ability to set permissions on anything other than Folders.

Why? Because we believe it simplifies the implementation of a scalable permission structure and how to collaborate. Allowing users to set unique permission on a 100 different models inside a single Folder isn’t practical. Now, you add permissions to the Folder and the assets inherit those permissions. Naturally, you can nest Folders within Folders and these can have unique permissions. But no more permission spaghetti on individual assets.

Our work on unhandled errors includes the following fixes:

1. AND/OR syntax gave an unhandled error when not writing to boolean statements inside them
2. DATE/DATETIME syntax gave unhandled errors when not using the appropriate format (YYYY-MM-DD for DATE and YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS for DATETIME). Both also gave unhandled errors when using text literals without double quotes (e.g. 2025-01-01 instead of “2025-01-01”)
3. Forward slashes were almost exlcusively used in text literals for URLs in the API tool. That lead to an unhandled error when using text literals and integer columns. This is fixed now.
4. DATEDIFF gave unhandled errors not using right interval (e.g. ‘days’)
5. The Filter tool didn’t check correctly for columns that no longer existed leading to unhandled errors
6. The Combine tool didn’t handle adding a default suffix (right) when there already was a column with that name. For example, ID and ID_right in the left dataset and ID in the right dataset would give an error because it would try to add ID_right again leading to a duplciate column name. This is fixed now.

Last but not least this release also includes a number of bug fixes and improvements:

1. We added a more detailed message when a Canvas session runs out of resources
2. We added the ability to test a Snowflake Destination before creating it
3. The Group tool had problems handling 50+ tools. This is fixed now.
4. We fixed the schedule modal for models so this now reflects that models without a published version cannot be scheduled
5. Fixed a couple of remove logics: removing a user now gives the person that removes the user ownership of their assets, deleting a group now removes all permissions with that group too and deleting folders now delete all children assets
6. Added a better description to the Snowflake Destination tool form to highlight the need for a schema
7. The Combine tool now auto-selects new columns
8. We fixed a bunch of edge cases with the Stack tool
9. There was a problem showing data on the datagrid when columns names included .. This is fixed now.
10. Fixed that changing a schedule on an asset should not trigger a rerun
11. The asset log summary has been polished and now shows more information
12. Publish a model version from the Folder View now works as expected
13. There was a problem jumping between datasets on the datagrid with tools that had multiple anchors. This is fixed now.

The Home page had previously been focused on showing credits. As we introduced credits in Less 2.0, we thought it would make sense to show these front and center. Turned out to be a wrong decision. Now the Home page is entirely focused on showing jobs - success, warnings and errors. We moved the credits overview to the Settings pages where platform Admins can dive deeper into credit usage. We also simplified our internal session management significantly. This should prevent users from experiencing issues with their sessions being terminated prematurely. Other positive byproduct includes that having multiple browser tabs open with different models should now work as expected.

This release also includes a number of bug fixes:

1. Fixed a problem in dark mode where the tabs on the Settings page were not visible
2. Fixed the width of the schedule form when editing an asset
3. Fixed that you can now delete tools and connection lines on backspace (primarily for Windows users)
4. Removed the ability to use strings columns in the Close Combine tool
5. Adjusted pagination on the datagrid to not show “100 of xx” rows when less than 100 rows are available
6. Fixed an error causing change of workspace to redirect to same workspace
7. Reworked copy/paste on the Canvas so that copy/paste in the Manual Input tool works as expected
8. Fixed the drop tool on top of other tools resets cache downstream
9. Fixed that it was impossible to remove Admin rights from users
10. Fixed a problem where copy/pasted tools could not run before opening their tool configuration
11. Fixed that restarting a session remembers your previous instance size

We have added a lot of new features and improvements to this version, amongst others:

1. We redesigned the entire platform with a focus on user experience and productivity
2. Destinations to support sending data from Less to any other tool - whether databases like Snowflake, worksheet like Google Sheets, or even emails via Gmail.
3. Customizable vertical scaling that allows you to select how much computation power you want. We already supported horizontal scaling enabling as many users to work without affecting performance. Now we’ve added vertical scaling to allow you to scale up to handle even the most complex datasets.
4. Complete rebuild of the Canvas to support multiple anchors, draft and publish modes, syntaxing, new Group, Loop and Comment tools and much more. All tools have also been overhauled for a significantly better experience and increase in performance.
5. We added Parameters to allow you to create and pass in variables to your models. It’s one of our favorite new features that allows you to create more dynamic and reusable models.
6. Built our own geospatial tools so you don’t have to rely on external tools.
7. You can now choose to subscribe to notifications for any assets you want. You can get emails, or you can choose to get Slack or Teams notifications.
8. Completely customizable roles and permissions to allow you to control who built exactly that structure that fits your team’s needs.
9. Audit logs for those people that just love to know everything about everything.
10. Cron jobs for more customizable scheduling
11. Built-in orchestration for running multiple models and sources in sequence
12. And much, much more…

We’d love to hear your feedback on this new version, so please let us know if you have any questions or suggestions.