Overview of YouPrep™

What is YouPrep™?

YouPrep™ is Toucan's no-code data preparation module. Our visual interface enables non-technical business users to transform their data thanks to operations available within a few clicks.

YouPrep™ will help you with most of the data transformations you need (filtering, computation, aggregation, text and date operations, reshaping, and combining several datasets)

YouPrep™ interface

YouPrep™ interface breaks down into 2 panels:

• The transformation pipeline on the left shows the ordered series of transformation steps applied to your data. When you need to configure a given step, the left panel switches to the step edition form

• the data table preview on the right is where you can click on your data to apply transformations.

• The right panel also includes widgets above the table. Transformations are available from the columns headers and widgets or can be found via the search bar.

You have different ways to use YouPrep™:

• By using the transformation on the column header:

• By using the widgets:

• Or through the search bar:

The resulting step appears in the transformation pipeline whenever you interact with the table or widgets to transform data. Any step can be edited, moved, or deleted. If a step in the middle of the pipeline gets edited or deleted, the following steps remain unchanged.

If you click on any step of the pipeline, the data table on the right will update to show you the result of the transformations until this step. Following steps get greyed to show that they are temporarily disabled and not executed. In that sense, the pipeline acts as a history you can navigate. It can be very helpful when debugging!

Subset of data

Note that, in order to have a nice experience, the preview of your transformation pipeline is based on a limited number of rows (10k by default). It can be configured by clicking on the "pipette" icon. It means that the "real" pipeline will be applied when querying your chart.

Performance optimization (steps ordering)

The transformation pipeline (combinaison of all transformation steps) are processed sequentially. So the ordering of steps matter, and is important especially when dealing with a lot of data. So it's highly recommended so minimize the number of rows, by applying filtering steps at the beginning, in order to allow the following steps to be processed faster.

Step insertion

You can insert a step in the middle of the pipeline. The general rule is that a step is added immediately after the selected step in the pipeline. So if you want to insert a step in the middle of the pipeline, just select the step after which you need to insert your new step, and apply your transformation.

More detail on steps documentation

You can consult weaverbird documentation if you need further information about YouPrep!

Native SQL - Data transformation delegation

The is a feature named NativeSQL within the product that allows to translate the YouPrep data transformation pipeline into an SQL statement when the preparation has been made on top of SQL connectors.