Pivot Table functionality

Description: What is it?

You should be able to add dimension groups as columns instead of having groups as a second row dimension.

So, you should be able to pivot on a dimension so that instead of the values appearing as rows, they appear as columns in the results table.

Problem: What problem does this solve?

Scanning through grouped data as rows is more difficult than looking at it as columns.

(Optional) Why: How do we know this is a real problem and worth solving?

https://getdbt.slack.com/archives/C026WJE4A69/p1644794904784429 lots of feedback from users

Success: How will we know if we’ve solved this problem?

• You’re able to pivot the results in your table using a dimension.
• You can order your pivoted dimensions
• You can add multiple pivoted dimensions

Audience: Who are we building this for?

Data builders: specifically people analyzing the values in teh results table.

What: Roughly, what does this look like in the product?

When you have dimensions in your table, you should be able to interact with them to pivot them (similar to how users can order by results now)

[JohnRomanski]

As a longtime (5+ year) user of Looker, I can tell you that the reason that we chose Looker was Pivot tables. As someone who has been looking for an alternative to Looker, I can tell you that any tool without Pivot tables is not an option for us to migrate to.

If you want to make Lightdash into ‘Looker without the price tag’, pivot table functionality is crucial. It is the most important missing component from the tool today. It’s the table stakes, it’s what people taking the demo for a test drive will look for first.

As an added benefit, choosing to develop this feature will make the answer to many other questions obvious, like #968, or “what do we do about the group in your chart configs?”

I don’t understand how the group in the chart configs works or what it is supposed to do. I looked in the docs, but don’t see any explanation of it there. (and I looked https://docs.lightdash.com/guides/visualizing-your-results#configure-your-bar-line-and-scatter-charts) I get the sense that Group might not be necessary and might be replaced by Pivot.

[owlas]

This issue is getting split into 3 separate issues, I’m not going to close this until we close #2905 so subscribers aren’t mislead!

1. Pivoting the table visualisation (in order to have pivot tables on dashboards + saved charts) (https://github.com/lightdash/lightdash/issues/2905)
2. Pivoting the results (explorer) table, to interact with pivot results when building charts (https://github.com/lightdash/lightdash/issues/2906)
3. Pivoting API - allowing for better control of pivot sort orders and table calculations (https://github.com/lightdash/lightdash/issues/2907)