2021 continued to be another challenging year for many across the globe. Despite the challenges, the Cube community not only continued to hum but thrived throughout the year. The following are some of the accomplishments and metrics that demonstrate the Cube community’s growth in 2021.

  • 4,500+ community members on Slack: We more than doubled the number of people on our Slack in about a year.
  • Published six new user stories with users around the world and we have more in the pipeline.
  • Kicked off our workshop series that provided hands-on labs on pre-aggregations and multitenancy. We even ventured cautiously into in-person events with fun and casual happy hours in San Francisco and London.
  • People often think of code repositories in open source, and our community members were definitely very active on our Cube.js repo: There were over 1,000 contributions on issues and pull requests with more than 100 PRs from community members merged.

Speaking of contributions on our GitHub repo, these ranged from improving documentation, contributing to numerous database drivers (e.g., for Dremio, Elasticsearch, MSSQL, Snowflake, etc.), having discussions on Helm Charts, adding GraphQL endpoint for Cube, and others. Some of you commented that you thought your contribution was minor since all you did was fix a simple typo, but I want to remind everyone that every contribution matters as they help improve our software (and yes, documentation is part of the software 🙂) and the community.

The continuing growth and culture of our community were certainly noticed by our investors and also instrumental to our Cube Cloud launch. We’re definitely looking forward to a brighter and even greater year in 2022!

Cube in 2022

We discussed our product vision and 2022 roadmap during the December community call. If you were not able to attend the December call, we encourage you to watch the recording and here’s a quick recap.

Our key value propositions (or “Cube superpowers”) will continue to be the following three areas:

  • Metrics layer: provide ways to build APIs for querying data
  • Access control: manage access for different users
  • Caching: speed up queries (e.g. with pre-aggregations)

In 2022, we want to build on these Cube superpowers and ensure that Cube can integrate with modern data & analytics stacks by:

  • Increasing support for new databases/data warehouses, streaming technologies, and transformational tools.
  • Supporting microservice to microservice use cases where Cube is being queried from server-side code.
  • Adding support for BI tools, notebooks, and data apps.

To support these initiatives you will see us working on the following areas and we hope to complete most of these items in the first half of the year.

  • Continue hardening SQL and GraphQL APIs that were released in Q4, and for SQL API add integrations for more BI tools beyond Superset.
  • Expand streaming database support (we already support Kafka stream)
  • Enable dbt integration
  • Complete our work on rollup joins across multiple database types.
  • Improve database configurations (for multiple databases, as well as for timeout and concurrency settings) for easier user experiences. Plus add new features for schema generation.
  • Improve ease-of-use for dynamic schemas.
  • Other potential improvements include adding support for:

Unfortunately, there are a number of other enhancements and features that we are not going to be able to work on in the immediate future, but we will keep our eyes on many of these issues (see below) and we welcome community members to add your feedback in GitHub:

Cube Cloud in 2022

In the spirit of transparency, we also want to share our plans for Cube Cloud in 2022. Our mission for Cube Cloud remains unchanged as we want to offer the most developer-friendly experience for Cube and offload your DevOps concerns. Some of the key features we plan to work on in 2022 are:

  • Query tracing and analytics to help improve your queries for performance.
  • More tailor-fit type checking and auto-suggestions for key terms in Cube.
  • Metrics catalog to provide an at-a-glance view for which metrics you can use.
  • Integrations with tools in the motoring & log space like CloudWatch, Datadog, etc.
  • Continue with Git tools integrations (e.g. Bitbucket and GitLab) and workflow enhancements (e.g. branch management, merge conflicts, etc.).
  • Credential store integrations so you can store your credentials outside of Cube.
  • Plus others such as a private cloud offering, Azure support, provide ways to connect local host/example databases, etc.

As you can see, we have quite a list for both open source and Cube Cloud and we’re looking forward to continuing the growth of Cube in 2022. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to start a discussion on our Slack.

Thank you again for being part of the Cube community and we hope everyone has a wonderful 2022. 🎊