October 2023 Summaries

The Superset Community Newsletter for October 2023, authored by Evan Rusackas, encourages readers to explore visual data tools by trying out Preset, a platform that allows users to start for free. Additionally, it offers an option to subscribe to receive weekly digests of new blog posts, ensuring that the audience stays informed about the latest updates and developments within the Superset community.

OpenTable, a leading global provider of restaurant technology serving 1.6 billion diners annually, relies heavily on data to support its operations and decision-making processes. The Global Strategy, Operations, and Analytics Team at OpenTable sought to enhance data self-service capabilities by transitioning to Preset, a hosted solution for Apache Superset, due to its flexibility, customizability, and ability to integrate with widely used tools like Google Sheets. This strategic move facilitated the consolidation of data sources, the standardization of reporting, and the establishment of a single source of truth, thereby democratizing data access and enabling team members to effectively utilize data for insightful decision-making. The transition was meticulously planned with change management strategies and training programs to ensure a seamless shift for hundreds of users, ultimately allowing OpenTable to spend more time on actionable strategies supported by data insights.

Spreadsheets have long been a staple for data analysis due to their familiar structure and ease of use, but as data complexity and volume increase, business intelligence (BI) tools offer more robust features for data exploration, collaboration, and reporting. BI tools like Apache Superset and Preset provide a dataset-centric approach that mirrors spreadsheet workflows, making them accessible to users familiar with tabular data manipulation. These tools excel at handling large datasets, ensuring consistent business metrics, and offering advanced data visualizations and interactive dashboards. They support real-time data connections and enhance team collaboration by centralizing data access and permissions. Despite the advantages, transitioning from spreadsheets to BI tools can present challenges in data preparation and flexibility, particularly for ad-hoc changes. However, Preset addresses these challenges by allowing users to connect Google Sheets and upload CSV files as data sources, facilitating seamless data updates and enabling users to create customized datasets without extensive support from centralized data teams.

DuckDB is an open-source SQL OLAP database management system known for its fast, scalable, and efficient data processing ideal for analytical applications, featuring a minimal memory footprint and robust SQL querying capabilities. MotherDuck is a newly released managed cloud service for DuckDB, enhancing the local experience with manageability, persistence, scalability, sharing, and productivity tools in the cloud. Although Apache Superset has supported DuckDB, security concerns previously prevented its use on Preset due to potential filesystem access. However, with the advent of MotherDuck, users can now securely run cloud-based queries, and Preset has announced the integration of DuckDB and MotherDuck, allowing users to connect their databases using a service token for seamless data querying and visualization. Preset facilitates this connection by enabling users to configure their database settings easily and utilize DuckDB extensions to query data stored in S3, with support for organizations needing dedicated infrastructure through Preset Managed Private Cloud.