Explores

An explore is a table that you can run queries against in your Lightdash project.

Explores are built from dbt models (either one, or many joined together).

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Adding Explores to your project

Explores come from dbt models that have been defined in your dbt project's schema.yml files.

If your dbt model has been defined in a .yml file, it will appear in Lightdash as an Explore.

For example, if we had this in our schema.yml files in dbt, we'd see an Explore called users in Lightdash.

version: 2

models:
  - name: users

Explore configuration

You can customize your Explores in your dbt model's YAML file. Here's an example of the properties used in defining an Explore:

version: 2

models:
  - name: my_explore
    meta:
      label: "My Custom Explore Name"
      joins:
        - join: my_other_explore
          sql_on: ${my_explore.column_a} = ${my_other_explore.column_a}

Here are all of the properties you can customize:

Property	Value	Note
label	string	Custom label. This is what you'll see in Lightdash instead of the Explore name.
joins	string	Join logic to join other data models to the Explore. Read more about joins in here.

If you've added a new dbt model to your project, you need to do dbt run + dbt refresh before it before it will appear in Lightdash.

Lightdash gets information about your data models from dbt. But it gets information about the data generated by those data models from your data warehouse.

This means that if you add a new dbt model to your project or update a model so that you're making changes to the table it generates, then you need to do two things before your changes will appear in Lightdash:

1. Materialize the new table/changes to the table (using dbt run).
   You basically want the data in your data warehouse to be the new table you're expecting. So you need to do dbt run to update the table from the data model you just changed.

2. Click dbt refresh in Lightdash.
   This will re-sync your dbt project in Lightdash so that any changes you made to your dbt models is shown in Lightdash (e.g. adding a new table).