The rise of the cloud data stack has been meteoric. In just a few years, it has gone from being the domain of startups and early adopters to becoming the go-to choice for enterprises all over the world.
The key to its success has been its flexibility and ease of use. Data warehouses like Amazon Redshift and Google BigQuery make it easy to store vast amounts of data in the cloud, while various business intelligence (BI) tools make it easy to access and visualize that data. This has enabled a new generation of data-driven applications and features, which are being used by everyone from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.
Earlier this month, Cube Dev, makers of the open source headless BI platform Cube, announced the addition of a PostgreSQL interface that will allow the developers familiar with Postgres, and BI tools compatible with it (which virtually all BI tools are), to query a single, consumable data source to perform analytics easily.
The Cloud Data Stack and BI
BI applications are designed to summarize and analyze large data sets. They are used by millions of businesses worldwide. The global market for BI software is expected to exceed $25 billion in 2022, making it one of the largest segments in the software industry. While BI applications can be run on-premises, they are often hosted in the cloud, making them a natural fit for the cloud data stack.
Cube enables BI tools, including commercial ones, like Tableau and Microsoft Power BI, open source ones like Apache Superset, or even custom applications using embedded analytics platforms, to query the same data model. This means different types of queries will all use the same definitions for metrics and dimensions, as they take advantage of a single query-able data source.
“It has always been our ambition to make Cube’s power accessible to a great diversity of data consumers,” said Artyom Keydunov, Cube Dev’s CEO and co-founder. “Data needs to be consistent and performant not just for developers but also for analysts and general business users. This requires bringing Cube into the tools where these users already work.”
Model Once, Query Everywhere
Businesses spend a lot of time and money configuring data sources their employees will connect with directly. The same employees then need to organize and coordinate these sources so they can be queried together. This results in duplicated effort and slow time-to-insight for everyone involved.
Headless BI solutions eliminate these problems by abstracting away all individualized configuration so that any application can tap into a company’s enterprise metrics without needing specific knowledge about underlying data schemas and how to transform them. The definitions in the data model are reusable across different tools teams within an organization, who can work effectively together using identical definitions, resulting in more efficient collaboration.
An organization can configure Cube once to access data sources, define data models, cache queries and act as a single connection point for data. This results in the same definitions being made available to developers and business users, regardless of the programming languages, tools or applications they might use. This means important metrics like “quarterly revenue” or “net sales” will mean the same thing in executives’ dashboards, marketers’ campaign reports, and a finance team’s revenue models.
Free Access for Developers
Cube’s headless BI platform is available to users of Cube Cloud, which offers free accounts that can handle up to 1GB of data pass through. Cube is also available in open source form on GitHub. Either way, developers have access to a familiar Postgres interface from their code and can bring analytics capabilities into their applications.
This content was originally published here.
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