✨ This week in Maia: Sample comparison, child pipeline validation, and monthly budgets

Welcome back to the Maia New Features Blog! This week, we're rolling out updates that make it easier to see exactly what your data is doing, catch problems before they reach runtime, and stay on top of your spend. For a full list of recent changes, be sure to check our changelog updates. Let's dive in.

🔍 Compare your data side by side, step by step

Compare samples lets you see how your data changes from one pipeline step to the next, without losing your place.

A new Compare samples option, available from the component toolbar on the canvas and from the Sample data tab, opens two samples side by side so you can check how your data looks before and after a step and understand exactly what each component is doing.

You choose when to compare, so nothing gets in the way of your normal work:

• Each side samples automatically when the comparison opens.
• A shared filter suggests columns common to both samples, and a shared row limit keeps the two sides consistent.

For more details, read Comparing samples.

✅ Validate all child pipelines in a single step

Pipeline validation can now check every child pipeline called by the one you're working on, so problems hidden in nested pipelines are caught straight away instead of surfacing later at runtime.

When you validate a pipeline, you can choose to validate all of its child pipelines too. This is entirely optional: by default, clicking Validate checks your current pipeline, but you can now click Validate pipeline tree when viewing any pipeline containing a Run Orchestration or Run Transformation component to validate that pipeline together with all of its children.

The benefits of validating the full pipeline tree include:

• Failures in called pipelines are surfaced immediately, rather than when a job fails.
• Changes elsewhere in the tree that would break something upstream are flagged.
• Validation status is shown on the components that call those pipelines.
• A record of each check is kept, so you can easily find results again later.

This means you can trust a validation result to reflect the whole job, not just the pipeline in front of you, without having to open and check each nested pipeline by hand. For more information, check out our Validating pipeline trees docs.

💰 Stay on track with monthly budgets

Budgets and alerts now work month by month, rather than only against your full contract term.

You can set monthly budgets for your account and for individual projects. Simply switch Monthly on and choose your own Warning and Critical thresholds—the monthly allowance is calculated for you, so all you need to decide is the percentages. Budgets are informational only and don't restrict usage.

Previously, budgets were tracked against the entire contract term, which meant alerts could arrive later in the term. For example, with 12,000 credits across a 12-month term (roughly 1,000 per month), burning through 75% by month 6 would leave just 3,000 credits for the remaining half of the year by the time you were alerted. Monthly budgets let you spot overspend while there's still time to respond.

Also new:

• Projects now receive an alert when they've used 100% of the budget allocated to them.
• Billing Admins and Super Admins are automatically emailed the account's annual threshold alerts and overage alert.
• You can delete a project budget directly from the table.

Budgets and thresholds are configured on the Budgets and alerts page, and you can manage how you're notified (email, Slack, or webhook) from the Billing tab of the Notifications page, where all your Maia notifications live.

To find out more, read the Budgets and alerts and Billing notifications documentation.

💬 We'd love to hear from you!

Let us know how these new features are improving your workflows—we're all ears! Join the conversation in the Matillion Community.