April 2021 Summaries

Cube.js has released its operational analytics platform, Cube Store, which allows developers to build analytical APIs and semantic layers over any SQL-compliant database or data warehouse with sub-second latency and high concurrency capabilities. Cube Store is a custom pre-aggregation storage layer designed to resolve issues with traditional databases used for pre-aggregations, providing a performant solution with guaranteed high concurrency and low latency performance optimizations for analytical queries. It uses a distributed query engine architecture, Apache Arrow for efficient in-memory data structures, and DataFusion as a query execution framework, written entirely in Rust for optimal performance. Cube Store is now generally available and recommended for use in production, offering benefits such as data federation via cross-database joins, and can be easily scaled horizontally with ease.

The latest release of Cube Core v0.27 brings numerous improvements across various aspects, including security, authentication, caching, client libraries, and Playground enhancements. The update is backwards-compatible and non-breaking, allowing users to simply update their dependency versions without worrying about breaking changes or deprecations. Key features include support for JWK-based identity providers, Cube Store integration, Vue integration with QueryBuilder and QueryRenderer components, and quality-of-life improvements in the Developer Playground such as enhanced security context management, clear invalid dimension markings, query prevention, initial database configuration within the Playground, and Vue code snippet generation. Overall, this release solidifies Cube.js' position as a robust and user-friendly data analytics platform.

The Cube.js community has grown significantly since October 2020, with over 3,000 members on Slack. However, as the community grows, Slack's limitations become apparent, such as lost conversations and difficulty searching old threads. The community is seeking a platform to preserve some of these discussions and create a collective knowledge base. A community forum was proposed as a solution to address both concerns, with benefits including better organization, creating a knowledge base, asynchronous communication, and content creation support. Discourse was chosen as the best option for the Cube.js community due to its familiarity, ease of use, rich feature set, and open-source nature. The forum will be used for sharing and discussing Cube.js use cases, recipes, etc., while other platforms like GitHub, Slack, and Stack Overflow will continue to serve specific purposes. The introduction of the Discourse forum is expected to help the community scale with everyone's participation.