Groups

Technical Database Schema

For the transactional database fields and schema structures, refer to the app.user_groups Table Documentation and the app.user_group_members Table Documentation.

To support collaborative and decentralized team management, Ravioli features User Groups. Groups act as collective owners of data assets, analyses, and knowledge entries, enabling functional boundaries and decentralized stewardship.

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Collective Ownership

When raw files, notebooks, or analyses are created, ownership can be assigned to a team group (e.g., "Finance Analytics", "Marketing Ops") rather than a single individual:

• Shared Access: All members of a group inherit permissions to view, run, and update the group's assets.
• owner_type = 'group': Identifies that a collective entity owns the resource, switching access controls from individual checks to group membership lookups.

Resilience against Asset Orphanage

In many data platforms, assets like custom SQL notebooks, registered data sources, and business knowledge pages are tied to individual user accounts. When a team member departs the company or changes teams, these assets often become "orphaned" and inaccessible, leading to dead links and lost institutional knowledge.

Ravioli's group-based ownership solves this struggle. By default, assigning assets to a User Group ensures that ownership is bound to the team context rather than the individual. The assets remain fully active and maintainable by the remaining group members, creating a much more resilient data architecture.

Database & API Access Verification

When a user attempts to retrieve, modify, or run a query against a protected asset:

1. The backend inspects the asset's owner_type.
2. If owner_type is 'user', access is verified by checking if owner_id matches the active user's ID (or if the user is an Admin).
3. If owner_type is 'group', the backend performs a join query on the app.user_group_members mapping table:

   SELECT 1 FROM app.user_group_members 
   WHERE group_id = :owner_id AND user_id = :current_user_id

4. If a matching record is returned, the user is authorized to interact with the group-owned asset.

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Decentralized Group Review Queues

By assigning analyses and insights to groups, Ravioli enables decentralized stewardship. Contributors submit draft insights within their group namespace, and any Steward associated with that group can verify them.

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Common Group Use Cases

To maintain clean data boundaries, organizations generally structure their Ravioli groups around business capabilities:

Group Name	Typical Members	Governance Objective
Finance Team	Financial Analysts, CFO, Stewards	Protect sensitive revenue and expense datasets. Ensure all reports are verified by a Finance Steward before presenting.
Marketing Ops	Campaign Managers, Marketing Analysts, CMO	Collaborate on campaign performance metrics. Enable quick iteration on Google Analytics and Ad spend data.
Operations Team	Ops Managers, Supply Chain Analysts, Logistics Stewards	Monitor fulfillment metrics, warehouse yields, and delivery datasets. Allow local Ops Stewards to verify operational insights.
Core Platform	Analytics Engineers, Admins	Manage system-wide transformations, oversee raw warehouse ingests, and maintain Docusaurus/Notion sync keys.

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Group Management

• Membership mapping: Managed via the secondary link table app.user_group_members, facilitating simple join queries.
• Group Metadata: Groups themselves have an owner_id (the user who created the group) and auditing tags (created_by, updated_by) to ensure administrative accountability.
• Steward Association: Stewards can be added to multiple groups to act as cross-functional verifiers, ensuring operational reports always undergo peer-review.