
At Cube, we’ve been excited to watch GraphQL’s growth in popularity and the rise of a rich and mature ecosystem of GraphQL front-end integrations and back-end tools. GraphQL has quickly become the most popular query language for APIs because it provides a complete description of the data in your API—giving clients the power to ask for exactly the data they need and nothing more.

However, I believe that while the GraphQL ecosystem is rich in tools focused on creating transactional (a.k.a. CRUD) GraphQL servers, analytical workloads are still underserved. This is particularly true for workloads designed on top of data warehouses.

For more than a year, a Cube GraphQL API has been the top requested feature from the Cube community. There’s clearly tremendous value for GraphQL users in having a uniform way to access both transactional and analytical APIs, in order to keep the data layer unified and organized. 

**Today, we are excited to announce GraphQL API support in Cube.** With this release, you can use Cube as part of your GraphQL layer to deliver metrics to your application.

We owe tremendous thanks to [Luc Vauvillier](https://twitter.com/lvauvillier), the COO and a co-founder at [Gadsme](https://cube.dev/blog/gadsme-runs-on-cube/), who contributed initial support for this GraphQL API and layed out the principal design:

> “With GraphQL support in Cube we can have a unified typed API for our frontend clients and be able to run code generators”. We built a GraphQL proxy on top of the Cube REST API internally first. Then we started to share our API design with the community, and when we realized that the additional work to make it generic would not be too substantial, we decided to contribute to have it officially supported. At [Gadsme](https://www.gadsme.com/), contributing to open source projects is part of our values and we really enjoyed working on this.”

With this API and [our recently-released SQL API](https://cube.dev/blog/introducing-cube-sql/), Cube can provide analytics data to a wide variety of tools and clients building towards our vision of a universal, headless analytics layer to provide metrics to any application. 

![image2.png](https://cubedev-blog-images.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/c957b4c8-5ea0-4d61-a610-21749d799953.png)

### Getting Started with the GraphQL API

Cube uses a JSON-based metrics framework to describe data calculations that can be exposed via GraphQL. Once defined, Cube will use these definitions to translate an incoming GraphQL query into a native SQL query to the underlying data storage layer.

Let’s consider the following example of Cube’s metrics framework that can be used to model orders in a hypothetical ecommerce data store:

```js
cube(`Orders`, {
  sql: `SELECT * FROM public.orders`,

  measures: {
    count: {
      type: `count`,
    },
  },

  dimensions: {
    status: {
      sql: `status`,
      type: `string`,
    },

    createdAt: {
      sql: `created_at`,
      type: `time`,
    },
  },
});
```

The main object in Cube’s merics framework is **cube**. Cubes always have the **sql** property. Usually, this points to the SQL table to which this configuration applies, but in more sophisticated use cases, a custom SQL query can be used as a property.

**Measures** are quantitative data—such as the number of units sold, unique visits, profit, and so forth. **Dimensions** are categorical data, such as state, gender, product name, or units of time. (You can learn more about Cube’s data schema [in our docs](https://cube.dev/docs/schema/fundamentals/concepts).)

Once the above definitions are created, we can start querying Cube via the GraphQL API. To get **“Number of orders grouped by status,”** we can use the following query:

```graphql
{
  cube {
    orders {
      count
      status
    }
  }
}
```

Cube will translate the above GraphQL query into a native SQL for your database and execute it. For example, if your database is Postgres, it would be the following SQL query: 


```sql
SELECT
  "orders".status "orders__status",
  count("orders".id) "orders__count"
FROM
  public.orders AS "orders"
GROUP BY
  1
ORDER BY
  2 DESC
LIMIT
  10000
```

Cube users probably are aware that Cube comes with [Developer Playground](https://cube.dev/docs/dev-tools/dev-playground), a useful tool to build and test metrics layer. Now, the Playground includes a built-in GraphiQL to test GraphQL API calls.

![image3.png](https://cubedev-blog-images.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/ab96e549-46c4-42d5-889b-f4edfc530256.png)

To get started with the GraphQL API from scratch, you can follow this [step-by-step guide](https://cube.dev/blog/graphql-postgres-metrics-dashboard-with-cube/). 

We’re excited about finally bringing GraphQL support to Cube, and we hope you are, too!  We’d love to hear your feature requests and use cases; please provide your feedback in our [Slack](http://slack.cube.dev/).

Want to learn more? [Give Cube a free try](https://cubecloud.dev/auth/signup).


Artyom Keydunov

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Introducing the Cube GraphQL API: Building GraphQL Endpoints for Metrics


[Gadsme](https://www.gadsme.com/) (literally Ads in Game) was founded in 2019 to provide an advertising platform designed for the gaming and e-sports industries. We are engaged in the serving of non-intrusive advertising embedded within scenes of video games.

Gadsme work with major video game studios and serve millions of ads every day. We keep innovating to bring new brand experiences to this area.

![Gadsme stock photo](https://cubedev-blog-images.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/66b39395-d91d-469c-a29d-7af29f21f708.jpeg)

## How Gadsme started using Cube

The Gadsme team first heard of Cube in 2019 after reading a post on Hacker News. At the time, we were focusing more on developing our cross-platform advertising SDK. When it came to building our analytics solution, Cube was the perfect tool to ease iterations around how data insights can be exposed efficiently to our clients. Now, all our dashboards (e.g., for ad requests, impression, fill rate, [eCPM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_mille#Effective_cost_per_mille), etc.) and reporting API use Cube under the hood.

As an AdTech company, Gadsme collects millions of events every day. All those events are stored in BigQuery. With Cube and its built-in pre-aggregations feature, we were able to expose meaningful data with speed and maintain complete control of analytics costs.

## How Cube was implemented at Gadsme and our contributions to the Cube community

Our team used pre-aggregations since day one. We were first using Postgres as an external [pre-aggregations database](https://cube.dev/docs/caching/using-pre-aggregations#pre-aggregations-storage) and now we have been using Cube Store in production since July 2021. This last move to Cube Store brought a noticeable speed-up in the loading times of data and graphs for our client dashboards.

We run Cube on Kubernetes, and we spent some time improving the deployment automation of Cube using Helm Charts. As other members of the community were asking for it, we decided to [make a contribution](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/pull/3277), and our Helm Charts are available for everyone in the [example folder of Cube](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/tree/master/examples/helm-charts). This was the first major contribution from Gadsme to the Cube project, and contributing back if possible to open source community is a key part of our values.

We also use GraphQL to build all our APIs. We decided not to expose Cube directly and preferred building a GraphQL proxy on top of Cube's [REST API](https://cube.dev/docs/rest-api) (see our architecture diagram below).

![Architecture Diagram](https://cubedev-blog-images.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/63a6a07f-4d68-4925-a0d9-1c1df168e888.png)

In November, we started a new [contribution](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/pull/3555) to the Cube project to bring the first official support of a GraphQL API. This new API is available since Cube [v0.28.58](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/releases/tag/v0.28.58) and supports the following features:

* API autogeneration based on Cube definitions
* Directives support
* Compatibility with the authorization layer (e.g., [JSON Web Tokens](https://cube.dev/docs/security/context), [queryRewrite](https://cube.dev/docs/config#query-rewrite), [multitenancy](https://cube.dev/docs/multitenancy-setup), etc.)

We also had the opportunity to discuss our GraphQL contribution during the [November community call](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ5Wl4yn71c&list=PLtdXl_QTQjpb1dHZCM09qKTsgvgqjSvc9), and we’d welcome your feedback on our contributions not only for GraphQL, but also for Helm Charts. 

## Interested in joining Gadsme's success with Cube?

Explore Cube [examples & tutorials](https://cube.dev/docs/examples) and [get started](https://cube.dev/docs/getting-started) today. To jumpstart your efforts, please join us on [Discourse](https://forum.cube.dev/) & [Slack](https://slack.cube.dev/), follow us on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/thecubejs), and get engaged with the growing Cube community.


Luc Vauvillier

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Introducing the Cube GraphQL API: Building GraphQL Endpoints for Metrics

How Gadsme is using Cube for analytics on their in-game advertising platform

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