Add selector for region

[critzo]

Telescope provides a selector for country, but other selectors would be useful, for example "region", allowing data for a specific state to be selected. Not sure this is a huge priority, but would be an interesting feature to add in a future release.

[collina]

This is a reasonable need, there has been expressed interest elsewhere, and it is something that we had considered before. At the time the biggest blocker was that MaxMind's regional taxonomy leaves much to be desired in terms of consistency, accuracy, etc. Also, I'm not sure we want to encourage attempts at analysis at levels where M-Lab does not have sufficient data for the types of research Telescope is intended for.

However, what we could do is make this country limited for the moment -- only US, since I have confidence this is well coded in BigQuery. To do so we could require the country be set if region is, and whitelist countries that we believe MaxMind's classification is reliable for, starting with the US and only expanding if there is interest and confidence.

It will require a bit more logic, e.g. only one country allow if region is set, etc. But if @mtlynch buys in then it can be done.

[mtlynch]

@critzo can you provide more details about the use case? Is there a specific customer / potential customer that wants this feature? Where possible, I'd like to focus efforts on making BigQuery easier to use rather than expanding Telescope's functionality.

@collina - I thought we had filtering by country in the dev branch. I'm not clear on the difference between what you have in mind and what's currently implemented.

[collina]

@mtlynch The request is for region (e.g. state or province), not country.