Tutorial: Use sample dashboards in Databricks SQL

This tutorial shows you how to import and use sample dashboards from the Databricks SQL Dashboard Samples Gallery. These dashboards illustrate some of the rich visualizations that Databricks SQL provides for gaining insights from your data. No setup is required. These dashboards use data that is already available to your workspace and rely on a compute resource (called a SQL warehouse) that is already configured. You don’t need to be an administrator to get started.

Requirements

  • The user who performs these steps must have the Databricks SQL access entitlement.

    All users in new workspaces have this entitlement. To grant a user this entitlement, a workspace admin can go to the admin settings page and grant the Databricks SQL access entitlement to a user.

    Note

    If your workspace was enabled for Databricks SQL during the Public Preview—that is, before the week beginning September 7, 2021—you retain the entitlement assigned before that date, unless a workspace administrator changes it. In other words, if you did not have the Databricks SQL access entitlement during the Public Preview, you will not have it now unless an administrator gives it to you.

Use the sidebar

See Sidebar.

Log in to Databricks SQL

When you log in to Databricks SQL, your landing page looks like this:

User landing page

Import a dashboard

  1. In the sidebar, click Dashboards Icon Dashboards

    If your workspace has any saved dashboards, they are listed.

  2. Scroll to the bottom of the page. In the Sample dashboards tile, click Visit gallery. The Dashboard Samples Gallery page appears.

    Note

    You can also navigate to the Dashboard Samples Gallery by appending /sql/dashboards/samples/ to your workspace URL.

  3. Next to Retail Revenue & Supply Chain, click Import. The dashboard is imported into your workspace, and you are the owner.

    The imported dashboard appears, and its visualizations are refreshed.

    Imported Retail Revenue & Supply Chain dashboard

You can import a sample dashboard multiple times, and multiple users can each import it. You can also import the NYC Taxi Trip Analysis dashboard.

Explore a visualization’s query

  1. Each visualization in a dashboard is the result of a query. In the imported dashboard, hover over the National Revenue Trends visualization, then click the Vertical Ellipsis context menu. Click View Query.

    National Revenue Trends context menu

    The SQL editor appears with the visualization’s query displayed.

    National Revenue Trends query

    The sample dashboards use data in the SAMPLES catalog, which is separate from data within your workspace. The SAMPLES catalog is available to every workspace, but is read-only.

  2. At the bottom of the query, change LIMIT 1000 to LIMIT 500 to return only 500 records. Click Run All to run the modified query, then click Save to save the query in the dashboard.

    Note

    When you modify the imported dashboard, the original dashboard in the Dashboard Samples Gallery is not modified. To start over, you can re-import the dashboard.

  3. Click the browser’s Back button to go back to the dashboard.

Interact with a visualization

  1. Hover over the Shifts in Pricing Priorities visualization. At the bottom, click the button at the right to expand the visualization.

  2. Hover over the expanded visualization. Buttons appear that allow you to download, zoom, pan, or autoscale the visualization.

    Expanded Shifts in Pricing Priorities visualization

  3. Click Close to go back to the dashboard.

Share the dashboard

To share a dashboard with colleagues:

  1. Click Share at the top of the page.

  2. Select a user or group in your workspace.

    To share the dashboard with all users in the workspace, select All users.

  3. Select the permission to grant.

    Share dashboard permissions

    By default, all six queries in the dashboard are shared.

    Note

    You cannot share an object with Can edit if it has credentials set to Run as owner.

  4. At the bottom of the sharing form, select whether the dashboard runs using the viewer’s credential or the owner’s credential.

  5. Click Add, then close the form.

Schedule automatic dashboard refreshes

You can schedule the dashboard to automatically refresh at an interval.

  1. At the top of the page, click Schedule.

    If the dashboard already has a schedule, you see Scheduled instead of Schedule.

  2. Select an interval, such as Every 1 hour.

    You can click Advanced to create a more complex interval, such as every 5 years.

  3. Select a SQL warehouse. A SQL warehouse is a compute resource that is specific to Databricks SQL. The SQL warehouse runs the dashboard’s queries and generates the visualizations when the dashboard is refreshed.

    Workspace admin users can create, configure, and delete SQL warehouses.

  4. Optionally, subscribe workspace users or notification destinations to receive an email version of the dashboard when it is automatically refreshed.

    Workspace admin users can create, configure, and delete notification destinations. The email addresses of workspace users are automatically added as notification destinations.

  5. Click Save.

    The dashboard will be refreshed according to the schedule.

  6. To stop automatically refreshing a dashboard:

    1. Click Scheduled.

    2. Set Refresh to Never.

    3. Click Save.

Next steps

Now that you have explored the sample dashboards, you are almost ready to start working with your own data.