September 2020 Summaries

The company behind Cube.js, a popular open-source data access layer, has raised $6.2M in funding led by Bain Capital Ventures with other investors. This round of investment marks a new chapter in the story of Cube.js and its growing community. The company was founded by Pavel and Plushcap (the author) who initially open-sourced the project in 2019. Since then, thousands of developers have adopted Cube.js, deploying it to over 70,000 servers worldwide. The growth has led to the establishment of a new company, Cube Dev, Inc., which will support the continued development and maintenance of Cube.js. The funding will also enable the creation of new features, such as improved documentation, external pre-aggregations, and real-time streaming platforms. Additionally, the company plans to launch a commercial offering called Cube Cloud, which will provide additional tools for developing, deploying, and scaling Cube.js applications.

Blending data from multiple sources is necessary when visualizing daily data in a way that allows for manipulation of everything as one solid bunch of data. The new data blending functionality in version 0.20.0 of Cube.js simplifies this process by providing two approaches: retrieving data as an array of query objects and defining a special cube within the schema. These methods allow for easier application of time granularity, finding seasonal patterns, and tracking correlations between channels. With data blending, developers can write less code, simplify their application logic, and build more creative visualizations.

Material UI is a popular React UI framework that provides a lot of ready-to-use components to build web applications. In this tutorial, we'll learn how to build a full-stack dashboard with KPIs, charts, and a data table using Cube for analytics API. We'll use Material UI for the frontend and Cube for our analytics API. The dashboard will display key performance indicators of an e-commerce company and provide at-a-glance view of several KPIs.

Comparing a single metric over different time periods is a common procedure in data analytics, used to evaluate company performance or understand customer behavior. Analytical systems like Google Analytics provide tools for this comparison. To implement analytical visualization with Cube.js, a server and dashboard application are needed, starting from creating an Orders cube within the schema folder. The code retrieves data for each year using multiple queries, which can be messy and repetitive. However, with the 0.20.0 release of Cube.js, it's now possible to retrieve data for different time periods using a single query via the compareDateRange property. This allows rewriting the previous code in a simpler way, setting time periods dynamically while keeping code clean, and creating useful data visualizations with substantially less code.