3.0 vs 4.0: Feature Comparison
What is Holistics 4.0 (As-Code)?
Holistics As-Code (or Holistics 4.0) is the latest update of Holistics.
The key update of Holistics 4.0 is the ability to do analytics work by writing code using a text-based markup language. Doing analytics work using code has many benefits:
- Version Control: Since analytics is code, analytics code can be easily checked in to Version Control Systems like Git. This allows you to track who changed what when.
- Code Review: Every change to analytics code can be submitted for review before deploying to production.
- Code Reuse: Analytics logic can be expressively defined, refactored and reused across multiple instances.
The language used in Holistics As-Code is called AML (Analytics Modeling Language). In another term, your entire data system can be serialized into code and the syntax for that is called AML.
Feature Comparisons
Since there are major architectural change in 4.0, not all features in 3.0 have been ported over to 4.0 yet. This table provides a brief overview of the key differences/gaps between them.
| Holistics Version | ||
| ⭐️ Analytics As-Code: Define models and reports using code | ✅ | ❌ |
| ⭐️ Git Version Control: Check code into Git. Develop in branches & create pull requests. | ✅ Learn more | ❌ |
| ⭐️ Integration with dbt | ✅ Learn more | ❌ |
| ⭐️ AMQL: Our experimental metrics-centric query language. | ⚙️ Working on | ❌ |
| ⭐️ Query Parameters: Support passing user inputs into model's SQL definitions at run-time. | ✅ Learn more | ❌ |
| Data Imports: Load data into SQL database | ❌ Deprecated. See Note 1 below. | ✅ |
| Modeling Experience | ||
| Automatic Relationship Creation | ❌ | ✅ See Automatic Relationship Creation from Database |
| Transform Persistence | ✅ ⭐️ Support flow-based | ✅ Time-based only |
| Model Dependency: Allow users to delete a model (or dataset) even if it has dependencies | ✅ Learn more | ❌ |
| User Experience (UX) | ||
| Auto-update modeling fields after changing the SQL definition | ✅ | ✅ |
| UI to edit and run SQL model | ✅ See release notes here. | ✅ |
| UI to edit and run Persistence | 🚧 On roadmap. | ✅ |
Notes
1. Holistics 4.0 will not support Extract & Load (EL) use cases. We recommend using dedicated EL tools like Fivetran, Airbyte and StitchData, etc. instead.