Quickstart for analysts

A 10-minute path from signing in to a saved chart on a dashboard — connect a warehouse, explore the model, and visualize the result.

This quickstart takes an analyst from a blank account to a saved chart on a dashboard in about ten minutes. It assumes someone has already invited you to an organization, or that you are starting your own.

#1. Sign in

Open your organization's Flax URL and sign in with your email or single sign-on. You land on the home workspace, which lists the connections, models, and dashboards you can access.

#2. Connect a warehouse

Flax queries the data warehouse you already have — Postgres, Snowflake, Databricks, or BigQuery.

  1. Go to Connections and choose New connection.
  2. Pick your warehouse type and enter the host, database, and credentials.
  3. Test and save. Credentials are encrypted at rest.

See Connections overview for per-warehouse details.

#3. Understand the semantic model

Your metrics live in a dbt-compatible YAML semantic model — dimensions (things you group by) and measures (things you aggregate), defined once and reused everywhere.

Open Modeling to browse the model, or read Modeling overview to learn how dimensions, measures, and joins fit together.

#4. Build a query in Explore

  1. Open Explore and pick a model.
  2. Add dimensions and measures from the field list.
  3. Apply filters and a sort.

Flax compiles your selections to dialect-correct SQL and runs it in your warehouse. See Exploring overview.

#5. Save a chart and add it to a dashboard

  1. Switch the result to a chart and choose a chart type.
  2. Save the chart with a name.
  3. Open or create a dashboard and add the saved chart as a tile.

Your dashboard is now shareable with viewers. See Dashboards.

#Next steps