At Cube, we deeply care about the experience that data professionals have when building and evolving semantic layers. We also enjoy taking the best of both worlds: with Cube being a code-first semantic layer that manages its data model and configuration through code, we strive to provide UI-rich tooling in Cube Cloud.
Today, we're excited to announce Playground 2.0, which is the biggest update ever to the toolset for building and debugging data models in Cube Cloud. We have completely rebuilt Playground to provide data engineers with familiar BI-like experience, extended support for the data modeling workflow, and convenient UI.
Watch the following video to see Playground 2.0 in action:
Also, read more for a complete breakdown of Playground 2.0 features.
What's new in Playground 2.0
BI-like experience. Acknowledging countless hours that data practitioners have spent in our Playground over the last four years, we also admit that many Cube users have prior experience with data exploration tools and BI tools in particular. Taking inspiration from well-known and emerging tools, ranging from Looker to Lightdash, we've redesigned Playground from scratch to streamline your data modeling workflow.
Now, when you enter the development mode and introduce a new cube, view, measure, or dimension, you're just seconds away from locating them in the intuitively-placed side pane and using them in a query. Of course, you can also go to the command line and query the semantic layer via an API; however, unlike other semantic layer vendors, we don't limit you to command-line interface as the only option to test and verify your data modeling decisions. Playground 2.0 is here to help.
Rich representation of the data model. Playground 2.0 takes a step further in providing a detailed representation of the data model in your semantic layer. Cubes and views, forming separate layers in the data model, reside on separate top-level tabs. Dimensions and measures feature familiar data type icons as well as clear annotations for primary key dimensions, non-public members, and members with custom descriptions in the data model.
Everything you liked and then some. We've packed Playground 2.0 with new features like global data model search with highlighting, an option to paste a JSON query you've obtained elsewhere, or conveniently placed UI elements to help you apply filters to the result set. Of course, we've kept the rest of Playground features such as data visualization with various chart types and pivoting, Rollup Designer for adding pre-aggregations, and security context selector (now placed more logically at the very top).
There's also a feature that is pending to be added to Playground 2.0. As part of our support for the embedded analytics use case, we're currently working on the charting code generation feature that we'll add to Playground in the upcoming weeks. (For now, you can use a similar feature in Playground 1.0.)
Try Playground 2.0 today
Playground 2.0 is available to all Cube Cloud users on all plans. Just log into your Cube Cloud account or create a new one and proceed to Playground.
Even if you aren't a Cube Cloud user or you're not yet ready to connect your production data source, you can get started in seconds by creating a demo deployment that provides a pre-configured data model and a demo dataset.
We know that Playground is a very frequently used feature, so, for now, we're keeping both Playground 2.0 and 1.0 available in Cube Cloud; you can switch between them if that suits your workflow better. After a short transitional period, we'll be sunsetting Playground 1.0.
Please share your feedback and feature requests related to Playground via our Slack community, in-product chat, and your dedicated customer success managers. We'll make sure to turn it into further improvements to Playground.
We also plan to move Playground 2.0 to Cube Core and make it open source as soon as the transitional period in Cube Cloud ends. We take data modeling experience in Cure Core very seriously and we'd like everyone in the Cube community to have and use great tooling.
What's next?
Please stay tuned for news on Cube Cloud and Cube Core; we have plenty of new features and updates in the making. As always, your feedback and questions are much appreciated; join our Slack community today to share.