Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer
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Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer
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Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer
#2I saw a project in similar space- Malloy- go by recently, in a post, What Happened to the Semantic Layer, which I thought nicely setup the space & problem.
https://carlineng.com/?postid=semantic-layer#blog
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35715410
They indeed mentioned Cube.js.
Bunch of Malloy links over time: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query=Malloy&sort=byDa...
And cube.js, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query=cube.js&sort=byD...
It's all very interesting to me because I get the sense these folks feel like we haven't figured out to to make meaning from the data we have. As a developer, that rings true; the developee is the agent responsible for understanding what we have in sql now & how to eek out meaning, how to structure more info in. The information architectures are so occluded & concealed, so stoggily low level. I love these attempts to try to help us think more about our data.
Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer
#3It looks very important, popular and well established, but what is it? I looked at the README hoping to understand what a semantic layer for building data applications means but no love.
It helps data engineers and application developers access data from modern data stores, organize it into consistent definitions, and deliver it to every application. Like an ORM? Or a middleware?
> Cube was designed to work with all SQL-enabled data sources, including cloud data warehouses like Snowflake or Google BigQuery, query engines like Presto or Amazon Athena, and application databases like Postgres.
Still not getting it. Is it that it can perform a single query across multiple databases?
Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer
#4Does cube support dynamically figuring out joins or is each cube a hard coded set of joins?
My similar, much less polished project doesn't require you to specify joins ahead of time outside of optionally defining a tree-like table lineage: https://github.com/totalhack/zillion
Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer
#5It looks very important, popular and well established, but what is it? I looked at the README hoping to understand what a semantic layer for building data applications means but no love. It helps data engineers and application developers access data from modern data stores, organize it into consistent definitions, and deliver it to every application. Like an ORM? Or a middleware? > Cube was designed to work with all…
From what I read it’s a way to expose SQL via APIs (along with stuff needed to do it like auth, perf, query reuse, etc)
Instead of starting from a general purpose web framework+orm you have your data/schema and can query it over http conveniently to build BI/dashboards.
Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer
#6It looks very important, popular and well established, but what is it? I looked at the README hoping to understand what a semantic layer for building data applications means but no love. It helps data engineers and application developers access data from modern data stores, organize it into consistent definitions, and deliver it to every application. Like an ORM? Or a middleware? > Cube was designed to work with all…
Say you want to build a dashboard with charts and custom timerange selection using data you already have in Postgres/other DB, without killing your DB under the pressure of queries AND without having to write an additional API?
Cube.js is the tool for that. Handles data modeling (you can define a schema on top of your SQL schema), caching, access control and API for you.
Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer
#7Is this tool kind of useless ? I tried to find all documentation on the website but find no way to embed the dashboard inside my Nextjs application. Or atleast, exposing a metrics as API to be consumed directly from frontend.
Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer
#8It looks very important, popular and well established, but what is it? I looked at the README hoping to understand what a semantic layer for building data applications means but no love. It helps data engineers and application developers access data from modern data stores, organize it into consistent definitions, and deliver it to every application. Like an ORM? Or a middleware? > Cube was designed to work with all…
Cube has saved me hundred of hours. I use it as backend for reporting and dashboard inside our SaaS. In our frontend I've build a light-version of PowerBI and I use Cube for a backend. Instead of manipulating SQL directly I use Cube's JSON query format. Kind of difficult to explain, but Cube might be the best piece of software I have ever used.
Maybe a good tagline would be "self-hostable Backend as a Service for data analysis"?
Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer
#9It looks very important, popular and well established, but what is it? I looked at the README hoping to understand what a semantic layer for building data applications means but no love. It helps data engineers and application developers access data from modern data stores, organize it into consistent definitions, and deliver it to every application. Like an ORM? Or a middleware? > Cube was designed to work with all…
Let’s say you work for a SaaS doing analytics. Your boss says “hey! We need to start reporting on new logos. Can you snag those from the DB?”
But what counts as a new logo? Does a pro serve engagement that doesn’t use the product count? What about a business using the SaaS but still in a trial period? Etc.
A semantic layer helps provide common agrees upon definitions to the business. So any one looking for common data entities can just look those things up… and can come to published definitions (which are backed by queries to databases, data lakes, etc).
Does that help? Another example of this would be dbt for example
Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer
#10I saw a project in similar space- Malloy- go by recently, in a post, What Happened to the Semantic Layer, which I thought nicely setup the space & problem. https://carlineng.com/?postid=semantic-layer#blog https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35715410 They indeed mentioned Cube.js. Bunch of Malloy links over time: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query=Malloy&sort=byDa... And cube.js, https://hn.algolia.com/?dat…
My operating theory is that in app centric development the data store is a component of the application. As a result, much of the metadata that changes data into information (data with meaning) is stored in app code and config. Upon ETL to reporting, warehouse, lake, or the like, the app’s semantic layer is lost.