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Last year my (former) team and I spent months evaluating BI solutions. Every week we were having meetings with companies like Tableau, Looker, etc. In the end,

Last year my (former) team and I spent months evaluating BI solutions. Every week we were having meetings with companies like Tableau, Looker, etc. In the end, my opinion was that we should just use CubeJS. Unfortunately it wasn’t mature enough at that time, as it had only recently begun to support Snowflake (our backend). If I were a betting man, I’d say they’ve got a very bright future ahead of them. Really cool product and idea.

mrwnmonm 5y ago
I am building a BI solution, with a different approach. What were you looking for in those solutions?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
  Nice! The space is pretty ripe for disruption because basically all of the tools are pretty old-school. Here are the things I really wanted: 1. Create dynamic schemas. Some of our clients had their own dimensions that they cared about. 2. Pick the level of integration. Imagine having an out-of-the-box integration available, but then offering fully customizable solutions for one-off scenarios. Really it comes down to those two things, which basically means "flexibility". Like I said, we spent months evaluating products, and while we found several companies claim to offer the above, no one actually did.
  - tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
    One thing I did not like about CubeJS (not sure if they've changed this), is that their integration is its own standalone server. Like, if you have an existing server, it didn't seem possible to just integrate it into what you already have. That was kind of a bummer, but it wasn't a deal breaker.
    - igorlukanin 5y ago
      Long time ago, it was possible to built Cube into a Node.js app. However, the team decided to deprecate it: https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/blob/master/DEPRECATION.md#embedding-cubejs-within-express https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/blob/master/DEPRECATION.m... The motivation is diverse but one of the reasons is that a Cube app should be scaled differently from a client-facing app. Noone probably wants their app to hang when Cube serves a ton of requests or refreshes cached data (and vice versa). That’s why it’s recommended to run Cube as microservices. I hope it’s not a big deal since a lot of cloud platforms provide container environments. Also, just recently, we’ve launched Cube Cloud which provides serverless experience for Cube apps and has a free tier: https://cube.dev/cloud/ https://cube.dev/cloud/
  - igorlukanin 5y ago
    Hey! Igor from the Cube team here. Coincidentally, in a few days, we’re having a workshop on multitenancy where we’ll cover dynamic schemas: https://cube.dev/events/multitenancy https://cube.dev/events/multitenancy. We’ll show how to customize schemas using pure JavaScript.
    - mason55 5y ago
      Do you have recordings or transcripts of the workshops? Multitenancy is huge for us and I’d love to see what CubeJS is offering now but I can’t make the workshop
      - peiback 5y ago
        we will, yes! here's our last workshop's recording, for pre-aggregations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_BP3B_wbec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_BP3B_wbec
  - pklee 5y ago
    What do you mean by dynamic scheams ?
  - seektable 5y ago
    Have you evaluated PivotData Microservice (https://www.nrecosite.com/pivotdata_service.aspx https://www.nrecosite.com/pivotdata_service.aspx) too? It supports dynamic schemas and beyond just API it comes with sample report builders (for end-users) and built-in pivot tables.
mason55 5y ago
I came to the same conclusion around the same timeframe. All the current solutions are not great but CubeJS just didn’t have enough maturity yet. I decided to just hold off on making any changes for a year or two and reevaluate. Hopefully they are still going strong in the spring/summer and then maybe we will go all in.
hodgesrm 5y ago
Cube.js fills a need I've heard many times in ClickHouse work--how to build a clean data delivery API that mediates application access to analytic databases. There's a basic impedenance mismatch between highly concurrent apps that may have 10s of thousands of users and backend data warehouses that run massivley parallel queries in order to get predictably fast response. Just as a shameless plug, Pavel Tiunov is going to be talking about design decisions on Cube Store at OSA Con on November 2. [0] We feel this type of technology is fundamental to scaling analytic apps, which is why we picked Pavel's session for inclusion. [0] https://altinity.com/osa-con-2021/ https://altinity.com/osa-con-2021/ Disclaimer: I work at Altinity on ClickHouse.

mrwnmonm 5y ago

I am building a BI solution, with a different approach. What were you looking for in those solutions?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
Nice! The space is pretty ripe for disruption because basically all of the tools are pretty old-school. Here are the things I really wanted: 1. Create dynamic schemas. Some of our clients had their own dimensions that they cared about. 2. Pick the level of integration. Imagine having an out-of-the-box integration available, but then offering fully customizable solutions for one-off scenarios. Really it comes down to those two things, which basically means "flexibility". Like I said, we spent months evaluating products, and while we found several companies claim to offer the above, no one actually did.
- tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
  One thing I did not like about CubeJS (not sure if they've changed this), is that their integration is its own standalone server. Like, if you have an existing server, it didn't seem possible to just integrate it into what you already have. That was kind of a bummer, but it wasn't a deal breaker.
  - igorlukanin 5y ago
    Long time ago, it was possible to built Cube into a Node.js app. However, the team decided to deprecate it: https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/blob/master/DEPRECATION.md#embedding-cubejs-within-express https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/blob/master/DEPRECATION.m... The motivation is diverse but one of the reasons is that a Cube app should be scaled differently from a client-facing app. Noone probably wants their app to hang when Cube serves a ton of requests or refreshes cached data (and vice versa). That’s why it’s recommended to run Cube as microservices. I hope it’s not a big deal since a lot of cloud platforms provide container environments. Also, just recently, we’ve launched Cube Cloud which provides serverless experience for Cube apps and has a free tier: https://cube.dev/cloud/ https://cube.dev/cloud/
- igorlukanin 5y ago
  Hey! Igor from the Cube team here. Coincidentally, in a few days, we’re having a workshop on multitenancy where we’ll cover dynamic schemas: https://cube.dev/events/multitenancy https://cube.dev/events/multitenancy. We’ll show how to customize schemas using pure JavaScript.
  - mason55 5y ago
    Do you have recordings or transcripts of the workshops? Multitenancy is huge for us and I’d love to see what CubeJS is offering now but I can’t make the workshop
    - peiback 5y ago
      we will, yes! here's our last workshop's recording, for pre-aggregations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_BP3B_wbec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_BP3B_wbec
- pklee 5y ago
  What do you mean by dynamic scheams ?
- seektable 5y ago
  Have you evaluated PivotData Microservice (https://www.nrecosite.com/pivotdata_service.aspx https://www.nrecosite.com/pivotdata_service.aspx) too? It supports dynamic schemas and beyond just API it comes with sample report builders (for end-users) and built-in pivot tables.

mason55 5y ago

I came to the same conclusion around the same timeframe. All the current solutions are not great but CubeJS just didn’t have enough maturity yet. I decided to just hold off on making any changes for a year or two and reevaluate. Hopefully they are still going strong in the spring/summer and then maybe we will go all in.

hodgesrm 5y ago

Cube.js fills a need I've heard many times in ClickHouse work--how to build a clean data delivery API that mediates application access to analytic databases. There's a basic impedenance mismatch between highly concurrent apps that may have 10s of thousands of users and backend data warehouses that run massivley parallel queries in order to get predictably fast response. Just as a shameless plug, Pavel Tiunov is going to be talking about design decisions on Cube Store at OSA Con on November 2. [0] We feel this type of technology is fundamental to scaling analytic apps, which is why we picked Pavel's session for inclusion. [0] https://altinity.com/osa-con-2021/ https://altinity.com/osa-con-2021/ Disclaimer: I work at Altinity on ClickHouse.