March 2025 Summaries

Preset Certified Superset is a specialized offering designed for organizations looking to deploy Apache Superset on-premise or in custom cloud environments, providing users with a robust, secure, and scalable version of Superset that is tested and supported by the original creators at Preset. This service ensures that organizations can leverage Superset to its fullest potential by offering a quality-assured distribution with regular weekly updates, faster than the official Apache releases, and access to a comprehensive DevOps toolbox that includes Docker images, Terraform scripts, and other deployment artifacts. Additionally, Preset Certified Superset provides expert feature development for custom enhancements and direct support from Preset's team, ensuring each deployment is tailored to the specific needs of the organization. This offering stands out by bridging the gap between open-source flexibility and enterprise-level support, allowing companies to deploy a maintenance-free version of Superset with the assurance of continuous innovation and stability.

Flywire, a global payments company, transitioned to using Preset, an embedded business intelligence solution, to enhance its reporting capabilities, reduce costs, and scale efficiently. Previously reliant on another tool, Flywire chose Preset, rooted in Apache Superset, for its flexibility, scalability, and ability to integrate with tools like dbt, enabling customization and localization. The switch resulted in significant cost savings and operational efficiencies, notably freeing up a portion of a site reliability engineer's time and fostering collaboration between data and product teams. This transition has allowed Flywire to quickly implement client-driven analytics solutions, enhancing their responsiveness to client needs. As Flywire continues its global expansion, it remains optimistic about Preset's scalability and future innovations, including upcoming AI capabilities.

Superset 6.0 introduces a comprehensive theming system that greatly expands upon its previous CSS-only approach, offering features like design tokens, dark mode, and complete component coverage, which are recommended for most dashboard styling needs. While CSS is still supported for specific customizations, theming now serves the majority of use cases more effectively. The shift towards themability is ongoing, with significant progress being made, though CSS remains relevant for intricate customizations. The post provides detailed guidance on optimizing CSS usage in Superset, emphasizing the importance of avoiding reliance on generated class names, reducing redundant style definitions, and leveraging CSS's cascading nature to maintain efficient, flexible styling. It also highlights the potential benefits of adding new convenience classes to the codebase and encourages the community to contribute to evolving the CSS framework in Superset.