October 2022 Summaries

The integration of Metabase, an open-source business intelligence platform, with Cube, a headless BI platform, facilitates a seamless self-service analytics experience for companies by providing a consistent data model across teams. Metabase simplifies working with data through its user-friendly interface, allowing users to query, visualize, and share insights without needing SQL expertise, while Cube ensures data consistency and performance by providing centralized control over data modeling, access, and caching. This integration supports the creation of dashboards and sharing capabilities, making it possible to embed analytics into applications and deliver self-service analytics to multiple users. A webinar is scheduled to demonstrate how Metabase and Cube can replace tools like Looker, highlighting their ability to streamline data processes and improve data accessibility within organizations.

Cloud Academy, a SaaS startup based in San Francisco, CA, uses a personalized e-learning platform to upskill tech workers in cloud technology and software development. The company's analytics platform was upgraded with Cube, allowing for a seamless, highly available embedded analytics experience, flexible data modeling, and secure context orchestration. With Cube, Cloud Academy has sped up time to release new data models by 5x and decreased analytics downtime by 90%. The solution has also provided features such as caching, SQL API, and alerts, making it an ideal choice for the company's needs. Cloud Academy plans to expand its use of Cube's features in the future, including incremental pre-aggregations and experiments using the SQL API joins.

We are introducing a new feature called "views" in Cube's data model, designed to create a façade of the whole data model that allows data consumers to interact with it. Views can define metrics, manage governance and data access, and control ambiguous join paths, making it easier for users to build fully semantic layers and expose metrics that make sense in the business domain at all times.

We've integrated with Cube to enhance your modern data stack with CrateDB as a starting point for building data-intensive applications. Cube provides a headless business intelligence platform that makes lakehouse data consistent, performant, and accessible to every downstream application, while CrateDB is an open-source distributed database management system designed to handle massive amounts of real-time data. With this integration, you can deploy a CrateDB cluster on CrateDB Cloud, connect it to Cube Cloud, and use Cube as a headless BI layer to analyze your data in various tools and applications.

Cube serves as a semantic layer for building data applications, aimed at making data consistent and accessible while resolving the many-to-many problem in metrics definitions, access control, and caching settings. Unlike other tools such as Looker, dbt Metrics, and Lightdash, Cube provides a comprehensive solution with features like multiple API support, visualization agnosticism, and pre-aggregations for query acceleration. Cube's data modeling is inspired by LookML, organizing metrics into "cubes" that can be modeled over tables or complex queries, and includes measures, dimensions, segments, and pre-aggregations. It supports connectivity to various data sources and downstream tools using SQL, REST, and GraphQL APIs, enabling flexible data presentation across BI tools, data notebooks, and front-end applications. Additionally, Cube Cloud offers a managed hosting option with tools like the Playground and data model editor, supporting easy integration and experimentation with data models. Through its integration with dbt, Cube can automatically generate data models, enhancing its applicability across the data stack and ensuring relevance to BI tools.

The Cube Core v0.31 release introduces several new features, including support for YAML data modeling, ksqlDB as a data source, and Lambda pre-aggregations. Breaking changes include foreign cube references requiring a cube member and the shownproperty hiding cubes/views from the metaendpoint when set to false. The release also adds views, a new driver for Firebolt and Trino, and improvements to the SQL API, allowing it to connect to more downstream tools such as Appsmith, Tableau, and Microsoft PowerBI.