Overview of YouPrep™

What is YouPrep™?

YouPrep™ is Toucan's no-code data preparation module. This visual interface enables non-technical business users to easily transform their data.

YouPrep™ enables data transformation through via a UI displaying a configuration form with different options depending on the data transformation steps.

Toucan has implemented different data transformation steps (filtering, computation, aggregation, text and date operations, reshaping, and combining several datasets)

YouPrep™ interface

YouPrep™ interface breaks down into two panels:

• The data transformation pipeline (combinaison of all transformation steps) 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 shows th result of the Data transformation applied to a subset of data

• The right panel also includes a widgets menu above the data table. The widgets menu gathers the different data transformations steps available from the columns headers

Use YouPrep™ steps

There is different ways to use YouPrep™ steps:

• By using the widgets menu:

• Or through the search bar:

• Some steps are only available by clicking on the three dot menu at the top right of each column header

YouPrep™ data transformation pipeline

When applying a data transformation step:

• the result of the transformation appears in the data table

• the step is added at the bottom of the data transformation pipeline.

  • you can edit any step configuration by clicking on the button

  • you can delete any step of a given pipeline by clicking on icon located on the left, if a step is deleted the remain steps will be unchanged.

  • It is also possible to drag and drop a step in the pipeline to execute it earlier or later in the pipeline.

If you click on any step of the pipeline, the data table 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. It can be very helpful when debugging.

Subset of data

In order to avoid to apply the data transformation on too many results and slow down your experience. The computation preview of your data transformation pipeline is applied on a limited number of rows (10 000 by default). You can adjust this number of rows for preview computation with any value. It can be configured by clicking on the icon.

Performance optimization

Toucan data transformation pipeline is processed sequentially. The ordering of steps matter, so we recommend to 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 a data transformation pipeline. The newly added step in the pipeline is placed immediately after.

So if you want to insert a step in a data transformation pipeline:

• select the step after which you need to insert your new step,

• Configure your data transformation step

• Your step is applied after the selected step

Hybrid Pipeline in YouPrep

YouPrep through Hybrid pipeline allows to mix different data transformation engines in one data transformation pipeline

• NativeSQL, which is a Toucan feature that allow to configure steps with YouPrep that will be translated in SQL and transformation at the database level

• Toucan in-memory engine where the data transformation steps are applied in-memory in Toucan backend.