Notebooks and Dashboards

In this release, Qubole provides various new features, enhancements, and bug fixes for Notebooks and Dashboards.

Jupyter Notebooks (Beta)

New Features

  • JUPY-544: Jupyter notebooks provide Qviz, a data visualization framework that enables users to visualize dataframes with improved charting options and python plots on the Spark driver. Gradual Rollout.
  • JUPY-574 and JUPY-573: Users can drag and drop objects such as tables and columns from the Object Storage Explorer to cells in a Jupyter Notebook.
  • JUPY-302: Users can transfer data from the local kernel to spark using the %%send_to_spark magic in Jupyter notebooks.

Enhancements

  • JUPY-571: Users can push Jupyter notebooks without output to the VCS system.
  • JUPY-614, JUPY-613, and JUPY-598: Users can view Hot Tables, Database Views and Partitioned Columns of tables in the Table Explorer.
  • JUPY-200: In Jupyter notebooks, users can use the %run magic to run a notebook from the current notebook.
  • JUPY-22: Users can get autocomplete suggestions for Spark and PySpark notebooks by pressing Tab in the cells. Users can also get docstring help in PySpark notebooks by using the shortcut Shift+Tab.
  • JUPY-650: Users can search for clusters in the Cluster selection widget when the offline notebooks feature is enabled and the number of listed clusters is more than five.
  • JUPY-662: When running a Jupyter notebook by using the REST API command https://api.qubole.com/api/v1.2/commands, users can specify if the original notebook should be updated by using the upload_to_source parameter.
  • JUPY-667: In case of isolated mode, the Livy session name is unique to facilitate multiple executions of a notebook in parallel.

Bug Fixes

  • JUPY-694: Spark session was terminated even when there were active tasks. This issue is fixed.
  • JUPY-679: The Open Command Logs context menu was not working when the scheduled run output was opened from the Scheduler page. This issue is fixed.
  • JUPY-654: Jupyter notebook commands were being marked as failed although the notebooks ran successfully. This issue is fixed.
  • JUPY-603: Spark application startup failed due to conflict with few third party jars. This issue is fixed.

Zeppelin Notebooks

Enhancements

  • ZEP-3231: Users can view data values for individual bars on top of single bar charts.
  • ZEP-4327: In the Notebooks UI, default prefetching of datasets to be shown in the Table Explorer is disabled due to performance issues with large numbers of datasets. Users should contact Qubole Support to enable prefetching of datasets.

Bug Fixes

  • ZEP-4497: The code highlighting in Zeppelin notebooks was lost intermittently with both offline and online modes. This issue is fixed.
  • ZEP-4471: The buttons were not updated after starting or stopping a cluster from the cluster drop-down in the navigation bar. This issue is fixed.
  • ZEP-4588: The Run all option submitted only loaded paragraphs instead of submitting all the paragraphs in a Zeppelin notebook. This issue is fixed.
  • ZEP-4582: Paragraph links in Zeppelin notebooks failed to load intermittently. This issue is fixed.
  • ZEP-4531: The Notebook content was getting lost or reverted after the Websocket reconnect. This issue is fixed.
  • ZEP-4303: Old paragraph results were displayed even when the new paragraph run had started. This issue is fixed.
  • ZEP-4559: Migrating notebooks to Zeppelin 0.8 with paragraphs having text form input with default value as None was failing with unhandled exception. This issue is fixed.

For a list of bug fixes between versions R58 and R59, see Changelog for api.qubole.com.