October 2024 Summaries

The open-source project Cube Core has released its first long-term support (LTS) program with the v1.0 release. This LTS program aims to provide businesses and users peace of mind and guarantees for the long-term support of Cube Core releases. LTS releases will receive support for 12 months after their publication, including fixes for defects that significantly impact stability and functionality as well as security fixes for critical vulnerabilities. The first LTS release is v1.0, which will be maintained until October 29, 2025. Cube Core continues to evolve with the recent release of v1.1.0 as a regular, non-LTS version.

Cube has released Cube Copilot, an intelligent assistant designed to empower data engineers to build and manage the universal semantic layer more efficiently than ever before. The tool is integrated directly into the Cube development environment and offers real-time suggestions based on current context, reducing syntax errors and mismatches in data models. It also accelerates the onboarding process for new users by providing guidance and suggestions as they work.

Cube has introduced an overarching Data Access Policies feature in its universal semantic layer, allowing users to define and visualize policies governing access to data in a user-friendly UI. The feature maintains data access policies as part of the data model and enforces them for users based on their roles retrieved via user directory integration. This new addition enhances Cube's existing support for column-level and row-level security scenarios, making it easier to manage and visualize access control policies.

Cube Cloud has announced several new features during its first-ever in person user conference, Cube Rollup. These include Tesseract, a next-generation data modeling engine; Cube Visual Modeler, a canvas-style shared workspace for visualizing and modifying data models; Data Access Policies, which enable users to define access control within the data model; and Cube Copilot, an AI assistant designed to assist data engineers in building and managing the universal semantic layer. Additionally, new capabilities have been introduced for Semantic Catalog, making it generally available to Cube Cloud users. These features aim to improve performance, enhance developer experience, and facilitate easier collaboration among users.

Cube, an open-source data modeling platform, has transitioned from using only JavaScript to incorporating Rust in its codebase, with almost 60% now being in Rust. The introduction of the Next-Generation Data Modeling Engine (Tesseract) will further increase Rust usage and bring new capabilities such as multi-stage calculations and improved performance for data model operations. Tesseract aims to optimize data model compilation, maintenance, and SQL code generation. Multi-stage calculations simplify complex queries like period-to-date calculations, percentage of total calculations, and period-over-period comparisons. The feature is currently in preview with multi-stage calculations available in Cube v1.0.0.

Cube has introduced a visual interface for data modeling, called Cube Visual Modeler, which allows non-technical users to participate in the process without writing code. This addition to Cube Cloud aims to bridge the gap between technical and non-technical users, enabling more collaboration across data teams. The canvas-style interface provides an intuitive environment for visualizing, creating, and modifying data models. Changes made on Canvas are automatically translated into code, which then goes through a code review process before being applied. This approach maintains the integrity of Cube's code-first philosophy while expanding accessibility. The new feature benefits non-developers by providing an easy-to-use interface and streamlining workflows, as well as offering advantages for data engineers and developers, such as insightful visualization and controlled contributions.

Cube Core has officially launched its first major version, v1.0, during the Cube Rollup user conference, offering enhancements over the previous v0.36 version, along with a notable breaking change. The update includes query pushdown in the SQL API being enabled by default, which is managed by the CUBESQL_SQL_PUSH_DOWN environment variable, and is recommended for optimal use with BI tools. Users are encouraged to upgrade to this release and provide feedback through the Slack community, aiming to enhance the user experience and foster community engagement.

The semantic layer in Cube serves as a trusted source of truth for businesses, standardizing metrics definitions and governing data access while ensuring optimal query performance through its caching layer, Cube Store. Cube protects data both in motion and at rest by using encrypted connections and proper authentication during data loading and serving processes. Today, an additional layer of data-at-rest protection is being introduced for Cube Cloud users: Parquet encryption with customer-managed keys in Cube Store. Unlike some BI tools that store raw data, Cube does not store any raw data but builds and stores data rollups managed by Cube Store. These rollups are encrypted at rest using industry-standard AES cipher with 256-bit keys, and key management is performed via the UI in the settings of your Cube Cloud deployment. Parquet encryption with customer-managed keys (CMK) in Cube Store is available to Cube Cloud customers on Enterprise and above plans.

The shift to cloud data storage has brought scalability, security, and accessibility but also challenges like the disruption of live queries from spreadsheets. Cube Cloud's universal semantic layer enables and enhances the spreadsheet experience by integrating with existing cloud data infrastructure, supporting a wide range of data sources, BI tools, and spreadsheets. It unifies data models and metrics, centralizes governance and security, and optimizes performance. By restoring live query capabilities, enhancing data governance, and optimizing performance, Cube Cloud bridges the gap between cloud data warehouses and spreadsheets, empowering teams to work smarter and more efficiently.

Cube and Coalesce have entered into a strategic partnership to enhance support for joint customers in building robust data platforms. Both companies are built-in-the-cloud technologies with developer-centric philosophies, and they complement each other well. The partnership aims to streamline the process of transforming raw data into useful business metrics by leveraging Coalesce's data transformation platform and Cube's universal semantic layer. This collaboration will enable developers to trace the complete path of data from source systems to applications, BI tools, spreadsheets, and AI use cases with ease.

Cube Core version 0.36 has been released, featuring long-awaited enhancements such as Playground 2.0 and Chart Prototyping, custom granularities for time dimensions, query pushdown in the SQL API, streaming mode in the SQL API, and performance optimizations in Cube Store. Additionally, some previously deprecated features have been removed, including Redis support for in-memory cache and queue, and the /v1/run-scheduled-refresh endpoint. The documentation has also expanded to cover these changes.