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](https://slack.cube.dev/):** We more than doubled the number of people on our Slack in about a year. 
* **Launched the [community forum](https://forum.cube.dev/) in April:** There have been more than 50k pageviews of our forum so far. 
* **Published six new [user stories](https://cube.dev/blog/category/user-stories/)** with users around the world and we have more in the pipeline. 
* **Kicked off our [workshop series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_BP3B_wbec&list=PLtdXl_QTQjpZRz8nOnBwWi2qjCqLC0gFj)** 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](https://twitter.com/thecubejs/status/1456608486813433858) and [London](https://twitter.com/thecubejs/status/1463859785758134284).  
* People often think of code repositories in open source, and our community members were definitely very active on our [Cube.js repo](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js): **There were over 1,000 contributions on issues and pull requests with [more than 100 PRs](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/pulls?q=is%3Apr+sort%3Aupdated-desc+label%3Apr%3Acommunity+is%3Amerged+merged%3A%3E%3D2021-01-01+) 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](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/tree/master/examples/helm-charts), [adding GraphQL endpoint](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/pull/3555) 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](https://cube.dev/blog/our-series-a/) and also instrumental to our [Cube Cloud launch](https://cube.dev/blog/announcing-cube-cloud/). 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](https://youtu.be/leikY7XJLYI). 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](https://cube.dev/blog/introducing-cube-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](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/pull/3507))
* [Enable dbt integration](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/issues/3611) 
* Complete our work on [rollup joins across multiple database types](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/issues/3530). 
* 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](https://cube.dev/docs/schema/advanced/dynamic-schema-creation). 
* Other potential improvements include adding support for:  
  * Other schema formats (besides Javascript).
  * Metrics testing and observability to help provide validation around your data. 
  * Explore ways to make [joins more explicit and easier to use](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/issues/438). 

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: 

* [Large query results (> 50k rows)](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/issues/251)
* [Pagination enhancements](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/issues/1927)
* [Funnel enhancements](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/issues/3764)

## 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](https://slack.cube.dev/). 

Thank you again for being part of the Cube community and we hope everyone has a wonderful 2022. 🎊

Ray Paik

Community Updates

Celebrating 2021 and looking forward to the New Year

I joined the Cube.js community about 8 months ago, and I wanted to look back at what we accomplished. You can find evidence of the community's growth 📈 in metrics such as the active contributors on the [Cube.js repo](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js) that you can find below.

![GitHub contributors](https://cubedev-blog-images.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/59001cbb-009e-4063-b869-ced4ff5a6f91.png)

When I wrote my first blog post back in October, my main focus was on improving communications in the growing community. I'm happy to report that we made some great strides in this area over the past 8 months through several initiatives.  

1. Monthly community call: I learned a lot from community members during our monthly calls as I appreciated many of you sharing your [user stories](https://cube.dev/blog/category/user-stories/) and providing us with valuable feedback, for example, during the popular feature demos. In addition to many of you joining the call and the live stream when the meetings are taking place, I've seen many more people watching the recordings on our [playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtdXl_QTQjpb1dHZCM09qKTsgvgqjSvc9) after the call, so it definitely looks like there's a good audience for this monthly gathering.
2. Quarterly roadmap: We also started publishing our [quarterly roadmap](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/projects) and discuss the roadmap during community calls on the first month of each quarter. As an open source project, it's important to be transparent with our plans and get feedback from the community on our priorities. 
3. [Cube.js forum](https://forum.cube.dev/): As the community continues to grow, we needed a scalable platform where community members can share their use cases, recipes, and others to start building a knowledge base. Since launching the forum a few months ago, many community members (including those who are relatively new to the community) started new discussion topics or posted questions, and we celebrated these "early pioneers" with fun Cube.js swags.

![Forum swags](https://cubedev-blog-images.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/e848b52a-719d-4b79-a50c-4288bf782300.png)

One of the constants over the past 8 months has been the generosity of our community members. Many worked with us to publish their user stories and then discuss them during community calls to share their Cube.js experience. These user stories provide real-life examples and best practices that other community members can learn from. 

It's also been great to see community members helping each other and making connections on the [Cube.js Slack](https://slack.cube.dev). Seeing exchanges like below simply make my day as these illustrate great collaboration among our community members. 🚀

![Slack collaboration](https://cubedev-blog-images.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/510c0a1e-7bd1-45d6-91f3-5cd769108064.png)

Finally, many of you have been very generous with your time whenever I reached out for virtual coffee chats ☕. I don't think anyone ever told me they weren't interested in jumping on a call, and I learned a lot about how you discovered Cube.js, your use case, what you like about Cube.js, what we could do better, etc. I always get energized after these calls and definitely would like to organize more coffee chats. If you'd like to schedule a call with me, please use this [link](https://calendly.com/ray-cube-dev/30min) (also in my Slack profile) to book a meeting. If you can't find a time slot that works for you, please feel free to DM me on Slack. 

I know it's a cliche, but time does fly when you're having fun, and it's hard to believe it's been more than 8 months since I joined the Cube.js community. I'm proud of what the community has accomplished so far, and I look forward to many more great things in the future.

Celebrating what the Cube.js community accomplished since October 2020

It's been great to see the continued growth of the Cube.js community since I joined in October 2020. One of the areas where this growth is evident is on [Slack](https://slack.cube.dev), where we now have over 3,000 members (compared to ~2,000 members back in October). The conversations on Slack have been great, and it's also great to see community members connect with each other.

As great as Slack has been, it does have limitations as a tool, especially as the community is growing. For example, there are many technical discussions on Slack that are getting lost due to the increased volume of conversations, difficulty in searching old threads, and the limit of 10k messages for a free Slack instance (there have been about 60k messages on our Slack so far). Over the past few months, I have been looking for ways to preserve some of the Slack conversations on a platform that could be used as a collective knowledge base for the community. 

At the same time, I got contacted by community members after the recent [user stories](https://cube.dev/blog/category/user-stories/) we published. They told me that they liked the user stories as they could learn different use cases and wanted to see more of them. However, they were concerned that these blog posts could require a lot of effort to get them published. In addition to writing the content, the user stories typically require reviews from legal, marketing, and others, so they're not something that could be published in a few days. Their suggestion was to have an interactive platform where community members can share their [use cases](https://forum.cube.dev/t/qualibrate-user-story/) or [recipes](https://forum.cube.dev/t/getting-around-the-limitation-on-the-length-of-schema-table-name/) with a lot less overhead and get feedback from other community members. 

## So why a community forum?

When I looked at ways to address both concerns around Slack and user stories, I thought a community forum would be a good tool to help our community. Here are some of the benefits of a forum: 

- **Better organization:** Forum platforms provide easier ways to organize and search discussions with features like tags or sorting by popularity.
- **Creating a knowledge base:** With better search capabilities and no limit on the historical conversations you can keep, forums will allow us to build a community knowledge base of use cases, recipes, etc.
- **Asynchronous communication tool:** If you've been away from Slack for a few days, scrolling through several days of posts gets tedious pretty quickly. On a forum, it's much easier to sort through topics of interest vs. scrolling through all conversations.
- **Content creation support:** If you're interested in contributing content like use cases, forums will provide a much better environment for writing richer content with support for markdowns, images, polls, etc.

We concluded that [Discourse](https://www.discourse.org/) is the best option for our community among many other options for the following reasons.

- **Familiarity:** As many open source communities use Discourse, we believe the platform will already be familiar to many Cube.js community members. In fact, a few community members pointed me to other communities' Discourse forums (e.g., [dbt](https://discourse.getdbt.com/) or [Ember.js](https://discuss.emberjs.com/)) for me to look at as good examples.
- **Ease of use and rich feature set:** Even if you are new to Discourse, we believe the user interface is fairly intuitive. Discourse also has nice features such as easy integration with tools such as Slack, the ability to do fun community-building activities through badges, and is mobile-friendly.
- **It's open source!** We naturally love open source, and it's great to be able to support another open source software & community.

## So, when should I use the forum vs. other community platforms?

Obviously, introducing another community tool could sometimes cause confusion, especially as people have become comfortable communicating on Slack. So I think it makes sense to clarify the purposes of each tool. If you want to take just one thing away from this post, I hope it's the following table. 😅

| Platform       | Purpose      |
| -------------- | ------------ |
| Discourse      | For sharing and discussing Cube.js [use cases](https://forum.cube.dev/c/use-cases/), [recipes](https://forum.cube.dev/c/recipes/), etc. Any discussions that you believe other community members will benefit from even weeks or months later should go here. |
| GitHub         | For reporting [bugs](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Aupdated-desc+label%3Abug) or making [feature enhancement proposals](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Aupdated-desc+label%3Aenhancement) in Cube.js. |
| Slack          | Connecting with other community members and for quick conversations/questions (and you don't mind losing track of the conversation in a few days).  Here's a good [example](https://cube-js.slack.com/archives/CC0403RRR/p1610127018362500). |
| Stack Overflow | For technical questions when you get stuck using Cube.js, e.g., "I'm getting the following error message and I don't know how to fix it." (like [this post](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66002998/how-can-i-handle-error-unknown-column-from-cube-js)) or "Is it possible to do X in Cube.js?" (like [this post](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64717207/vue-js-querybuilder-by-cube-js-anonymise-columns-by-local-value)) |

As with any changes, it may take a little while to get to a community norm with a new tool, but  I believe Discourse will be a valuable resource that can help the Cube.js community scale with everyone's participation.  One of the things you are going to see is the Discourse emoji on Slack threads as you can see in the example below.  

![Screenshot 2021-04-12 at 15.35.48.png](https://cubedev-blog-images.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/3b3ed7dc-906c-4059-abe2-27d8bbc13314.png)

We'll use this emoji when we see a discussion that'd be a better fit for Discourse and then export the entire thread to Discourse, where texts in the exported are fully searchable (this is actually a great [feature](https://meta.discourse.org/t/chatroom-integration-plugin-discourse-chat-integration/66522/233?u=ray_paik) of the Discourse-Slack integration). Once a thread is exported to Discourse, we'll ask everyone to continue the discussion there, as you can see in [this example](https://forum.cube.dev/t/getting-around-the-limitation-on-the-length-of-schema-table-name/) below.

![Screen_Shot_2021-03-21_at_10.17.50_PM.png](https://cubedev-blog-images.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/5bb70b81-a98a-43e2-b367-40857e77b3f9.png)

## What can we look forward to next?

Finally, we want to have some fun as community members get introduced to the Cube.js Discourse forum. So we will be sending a couple of different swags to recognize the early pioneers. The first is for community members who create the first 10 new topics in each of our categories. The other swag will be awarded to top monthly posters for the next six months. We hope people will enjoy seeing these tokens near their desks or even carry them in their backpacks!

I plan to follow up with another post on how things are going after we had a chance to get comfortable using Discourse. In the meantime, I encourage you to get in touch with me with any questions/feedback on our Discourse forum, or better yet, start a topic under the [General category](https://forum.cube.dev/c/general/6) in Discourse if you want to kick off a discussion with the community!

Introducing the Cube.js community forum

One of the main reasons I enjoy being part of open source communities is that they bring together people with diverse backgrounds to work on interesting problems. These days, open source community members contribute more than code. They also improve documentation, help new users, provide feedback on products, report bugs, organize local meetups, etc.  

People contribute to open source projects for many reasons, ranging from improving the software they use daily to pursuing opportunities for professional growth (both technical and non-technical). However, you also see people in communities driven by more intrinsic motivations such as genuinely enjoying working with the technology or even simply helping others. 

**Even though these intrinsically driven people are not necessarily looking for recognition, that doesn't mean they don't deserve one or appreciate being recognized.** Even a simple "thank you" in a direct message can brighten someone's day by simply letting them know that their contribution was noticed. Beyond words of thanks, swags are also a great tool for recognition and fostering a sense of community. We are working on fun Cube.js swags, and we hope to see more celebrations like this in the near future:

![Screenshot 2021-02-01 at 12.16.56.png](https://media.graphcms.com/GNiZiM3GQkSi4Ej6Yxn2)

**We also want to have more formal recognition for community members. As a part of this more formal recognition, we want to introduce Cube.js Heroes who made sustained (e.g., for 12 months or more) contributions to the Cube.js project and community.**  Heroes will be relied upon to help other community members and represent us at local meetups to industry conferences. Along with other community members, the Heroes will also serve as a sounding board on important community-related issues in the future. We look forward to their on-going contributions, and you will find them in the [Cube.js repo](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js), [Slack](https://slack.cube.dev), [Monthly Community Calls](https://www.notion.so/Cube-js-Monthly-Community-Calls-f394e5c131cb4bd1bc64ed850b0186d8), and other channels. 

We learned from contributor programs from other open source communities, and they served as inspirations. However, we really wanted to emphasize the diversity of membership for the Heroes from the beginning rather than addressing it later on. 

For diversity, we want to be inclusive of gender identity, geography, industry, types of contributions, etc. As a result, there will be a limit of one Hero from each organization (e.g., company, academic institution, etc.). Also, we will have a 2-year term for each individual. Heroes are welcome to serve multiple terms, but I believe having a set term allows people to consider stepping down gracefully when there are changes in their lives (e.g., a new job) or simply giving other community members an opportunity.

Also, our primary goal isn't to have as many Heroes as we can in the Cube.js Community. So you will see us growing the ranks gradually that's reflective of the overall Cube.js community size. 

We will continue to iterate on the program as the Cube.js community grows. For example, we may introduce formal nomination and voting processes for future members. If you have other suggestions or thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

**Without further delay, I would like to introduce you to the first class of Cube.js Hereos.**

![Jc_Weinrich.png](https://media.graphcms.com/HKQE4zRB20Znl8ME01Q3)

![Ricardo_Tapia.png](https://media.graphcms.com/WWMZhukGQZ6SN9HeRgSp)

![Tanvi_Pal.png](https://media.graphcms.com/RpWJuhUTAGNkoWHdB4tQ)

**I want to thank Jc, Ricardo, and Tanvi for their contributions since the early days of Cube.js and congratulate them on being our Heroes.** I personally enjoyed working with them over the past few months as I got up to speed on my role and look forward to continuing working with them to help the Cube.js community grow. 

If you're interested in learning how you can contribute to Cube.js, come visit our [Community page](https://cube.dev/community/)!

Celebrating community contributions and introducing Cube.js Heroes

When people hear open source, many think of things like source code, repositories, reviews, etc. that are related to code or software. However, open source communities are much more than just code. Open source community is a place where people come together to collaborate on solving common problems that they care about—e.g. making it easier to build analytics tools for your business applications—and even form connections with other community members.

**This is my second week at Cube Dev, and I'm excited to join the Cube.js community.** I have been fortunate enough to work with a lot of great open source communities at the Linux Foundation and most recently at GitLab, but this opportunity to get involved during the early stage of building a community is definitely exciting. 

I have already seen a lot of contributions—whether it's code, helping answer questions on Slack/Stack Overflow, opening issues, etc.—from the community and I look forward to playing my part in the continued growth of Cube.js. As I'm getting started, I wanted to initiate a couple of things to improve the communication in the community.  

## Streamlining our communications on [Slack](https://slack.cube.dev)

Today we have more than 2,000 members on our Cube.js Slack instance. Slack is definitely one of the most popular tools today and is easy to use, but it can be challenging for everyone to do searches and it doesn't scale well for things like questions.

When you look at the [Cube.js Slack](https://slack.cube.dev)  today, most discussions are happening on the `#general` channel whether it's related to support, quick questions, or other announcements. In order to make it easier for you to navigate through different discussions, we recently added `#announcement` and `#introductions` channels: 

- The `#announcement` will be used to post news of interest to the community like the recent funding announcement.
- The `#introductions` channel is for new community members to introduce themselves. We hope this will foster closer connections in the community and make new members feel welcome.

Anyone who joins the Cube.js Slack will "auto join" these two new channels along with `#general`, and people who are currently on the `#general` channel will be bulk added to the new channels.  

We encourage you to continue to post general Cube.js questions on the `#general` channel, but you will also see a lot of encouragement to post your questions on [Stack Overflow](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/cube.js?tab=Newest) if lot of community members may have similar question (e.g. for questions like "I don't understand this error message"). It's easier to search topics on Stack Overflow and we won't have to worry about losing old messages like we do in Slack with the 10k limit on messages.   

Finally on Slack, you may have noticed the Cube logo next to the names of Cube Dev team members. We believe this will make it easier for you to identify the Cube Dev team members in Slack.

![Screenshot 2020-10-22 at 15.50.04.png](https://media.graphcms.com/vQ0lFQpAQNuQtQZjmiCk)

## Holding regular community calls

Although asynchronous communications/workflow is the norm in open source, synchronous conversations/meetings (even if it's virtual) can provide opportunities for more interactions among community members. Starting in November, we'll kick off a monthly community call so that community members can discuss various topics of interest in the community. Potential topics include Cube Dev team's plans for the quarter, reviewing backlogs, interesting use cases, community metrics, etc. We also encourage you to suggest potential topics for future calls on Slack. 

You will hear about upcoming meeting announcements on Slack, Twitter, newsletter, etc. We will also post meeting logistics information including the Zoom link, links to meeting notes/recordings, etc. in the [Cube.js GitHub repo](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js) (e.g. in the [CONTRIBUTING.md file](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md)) so that you can also go to the same place to find the meeting information. 

These are two quick things for now, but please stay tuned for more to come in the Cube.js community in future blog posts. Please don't hesitate to find me on Slack (`Ray Paik`) or email me at [ray@cube.dev](mailto:ray@cube.dev) if you have any feedback or if you'd like to schedule a virtual coffee chat. I look forward to meeting many of you in the near future!

Community Updates

Celebrating 2021 and looking forward to the New Year

Celebrating what the Cube.js community accomplished since October 2020

Introducing the Cube.js community forum

Celebrating community contributions and introducing Cube.js Heroes

Improving communications in the growing Cube.js community