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Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer

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Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer

#31

Post by jayatid »

rendall wrote: post #3

It 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…

It is kind of like an ORM. I find ORM's and semantic layers to be similar in many ways, except that semantic layers are meant for defining metrics too. These metrics describe aggregating data. Like summing order amounts to get revenue, or counting order_ids to get sales.

I wrote a series on semantic layers on my substack, hopefully it helps: https://davidsj.substack.com/p/semantic-superiority-part-1

Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer

#32

Post by pacofvf »

rendall wrote: post #3

It 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…

> It looks very important, popular and well established, but what is it?

It's easier to explain what Cube is if we first define what the Semantic Layer(SL) is. In a few words, the SL is the abstract representation of business objects, for example: sales, users, conversion rates, etc. Cube provides the language to define the SL, an API to access it, access control mechanisms and a caching layer. It's important to emphasize that Cube is a stand-alone SL, decoupled from any BI visualization tool. That's the "headless" part, and I would also add that is "feetless" since it supports multiple source DBs. Looker the other big name in the space has the incentive of selling you more usage of BigQuery and of locking you in with their UI, it just recently started to open up to the idea of APIs. The idea is that you have a central place where you define the SL and then you don't need to duplicate the definition on every downstream application, which may lead to errors or inconsistencies.

> Is it that it can perform a single query across multiple databases?

Cube allows you to join data from multiple databases at the caching layer, that's fundamentally differently than a federated query engine. But from the downstream application perspective it has the same outcome. By being done at the caching layer it has inherent advantages and limitations vs federated queries.

I really like these series of articles by David Jayatillake that go into deeper detail:

1. https://davidsj.substack.com/p/semantic-superiority-part-1 2. https://davidsj.substack.com/p/semantic-superiority-part-2 3. https://davidsj.substack.com/p/semantic-superiority-part-3 4. https://davidsj.substack.com/p/semantic-superiority-part-4 5. https://davidsj.substack.com/p/semantic-superiority-part-5

Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer

#33

Post by pastacacioepepe »

jspash wrote: post #14

There used to be a product called Statsbot which was a friendly UI built on top of Cube.js. They shuttered the service a few years back and we're still struggling to find an alternative that is as simple to use by anyone in the company and easy to set up. We've gone through all the usual BI suspects and nothing comes close. I'd love to find the time to rebuild this.

I've never used Statsbot but you can easily integrate cube with retool. They even have a guide for it, it's the first result on google for cube + retool.

Also worth mentioning retool it's really cheap compared to "delphi" that I'm seeing shared in other comments.

Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer

#34

Post by igorlukanin »

carlineng wrote: post #30
igorlukanin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So good you brought Malloy here. I like it quite a bit because the folks really try to innovate (heck, they even have their own data querying syntax to replace SQL). But what I like even more — being part of the Cube team — that the "cons" of existing solutions that Carlin mentions in his blog are actually already solved by Cube. With Cube, Data exploration, ideation on the data model, querying, and bringing the insi…

My understanding of Cube is that iterating on the data model requires the user to (1) write SQL to develop a metric (2) edit YAML or JS config to incorporate the new metric (3) issue API request to Cube server and (4) compare results to raw SQL. Am I mistaken? Does Cube offer a smoother way to do this exploration/iteration?

Hey, Carlin! Nice to see you here in comments! (Waving "hi" to the Malloy team.)

Usually, the experience would look like this: one directly develops the data model in YAML (with only bits of SQL, if needed) and instantly explores metrics. No need to start with SQL in a separate tool/place (1), no need to use the API to check metrics (2) (for that, we have Playground, an interactive UI tool), and, thus, no need to compare results to raw SQL (4). You iterate but changing the data model and seeing the metrics in an instant, quite similar to how you work with Malloy, if I may.

Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer

#35

Post by igorlukanin »

jayatid wrote: post #31
rendall wrote: post #3

It 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…

It is kind of like an ORM. I find ORM's and semantic layers to be similar in many ways, except that semantic layers are meant for defining metrics too. These metrics describe aggregating data. Like summing order amounts to get revenue, or counting order_ids to get sales. I wrote a series on semantic layers on my substack, hopefully it helps: https://davidsj.substack.com/p/semantic-superiority-part-1

I think ORMs have got some bad press because they were intended to be used bi-directionally: map data from the data source to business objects and back. With semantic layers, data is only mapped to metrics and rarely back - which makes things much simpler, IMO.

Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer

#36

Post by igorlukanin »

pastacacioepepe wrote: post #33
jspash wrote: post #14

There used to be a product called Statsbot which was a friendly UI built on top of Cube.js. They shuttered the service a few years back and we're still struggling to find an alternative that is as simple to use by anyone in the company and easy to set up. We've gone through all the usual BI suspects and nothing comes close. I'd love to find the time to rebuild this.

I've never used Statsbot but you can easily integrate cube with retool. They even have a guide for it, it's the first result on google for cube + retool. Also worth mentioning retool it's really cheap compared to "delphi" that I'm seeing shared in other comments.

Here's the Retool guide (https://cube.dev/blog/building-an-internal-dashboard-with-re...) but I don't think Retool should be compared to Delphi; one is a low-code tool builder; the other one is a conversational interface for the semantic layer. Both are great for their purposes, both can be used with Cube, even at the same time :-)

Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer

#37

Post by mbesto »

igorlukanin wrote: post #28
rendall wrote: post #3

It 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…

As part of the Cube team, I have to admit that all descriptions in the sibling comments make a lot of sense. Of course, the "semantic layer" thing is quite known to data engineers/analysts and other data folks in general (they also know things like "metrics store", "headless BI", etc.) but not that well known outside of the data space. Probably, it would be best to describe what are the major use cases Cube is create…

So how does this compare to am embedded analytics service like SiSense, Looker? Is this sort of in between?

Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer

#38

Post by pastacacioepepe »

igorlukanin wrote: post #36
pastacacioepepe wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used Statsbot but you can easily integrate cube with retool. They even have a guide for it, it's the first result on google for cube + retool. Also worth mentioning retool it's really cheap compared to "delphi" that I'm seeing shared in other comments.

Here's the Retool guide ( https://cube.dev/blog/building-an-internal-dashboard-with-re... ) but I don't think Retool should be compared to Delphi; one is a low-code tool builder; the other one is a conversational interface for the semantic layer. Both are great for their purposes, both can be used with Cube, even at the same time :-)

Fair enough, I don't know anything about Delphi except its price tag. Given OPs request for a friendly UI to sit on top of cube I thought retool could fit well that use case. And thanks for sharing the guide, I use and love Cube but I didn't want to pass as a shill :)

Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer

#39

Post by ShaunK »

mbesto wrote: post #37
igorlukanin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As part of the Cube team, I have to admit that all descriptions in the sibling comments make a lot of sense. Of course, the "semantic layer" thing is quite known to data engineers/analysts and other data folks in general (they also know things like "metrics store", "headless BI", etc.) but not that well known outside of the data space. Probably, it would be best to describe what are the major use cases Cube is create…

So how does this compare to am embedded analytics service like SiSense, Looker? Is this sort of in between?

My understanding is that it's essentially Looker minus the dashboarding. What you would define via LookML is essentially the "semantic layer" that this is addressing. DBT is attempting to do similar work: https://www.getdbt.com/product/semantic-layer/

Re: Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer

#40

Post by igorlukanin »

ShaunK wrote: post #39
mbesto wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how does this compare to am embedded analytics service like SiSense, Looker? Is this sort of in between?

My understanding is that it's essentially Looker minus the dashboarding. What you would define via LookML is essentially the "semantic layer" that this is addressing. DBT is attempting to do similar work: https://www.getdbt.com/product/semantic-layer/

"Looker minus dashboarding plus APIs (SQL/REST/GraphQL) and, subjectively, better aggregate awareness (AKA "pre-aggregations" in Cube).
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