Cube is known to be the only open-source semantic layer with legitimate adoption and, among other reasons, this is due to its great data modeling capabilities. Lately, we've been focusing on increasing the sophistication of the data modeling experience in Cube with custom time dimension granularities and multi-stage calculations.

Today, we are excited to announce the release of hierarchies and folders support. Now, you can use hierarchies to organize dimensions in your cubes. Also, you can group members of a view into logical folders to make it easier to navigate and understand the data model. Cube will ensure that hierarchies and folders are correctly reflected in the BI tools that support them.

See hierarchies and folders in action in this video:

Hierarchies

Often, data model have numerous dimensions and some of them are crearly related to each other. Hierarchies can help organize such dimensions by grouping them together and assigning appropriate levels of granularity. For example, the location hierarchy can include country, state, city, and zip_code dimensions:

cubes:
  - name: customers
    # ...


    dimensions:
      # Dimension definitions skipped for brevity


    hierarchies:
      - name: location
        title: Customer Location
        levels:
          - country
          - state
          - city
          - zip_code

Cube will only expose hierarchies defined in your data model to BI tools that support them. Right now, you can use hierarchies in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Power BI. If you're building a custom embedded analytics solution, you can use hierarchies there as well: they are available via the metadata API endpoint.

Finally, Playground can also visualize hierarchies and folders for you, both in Cube Cloud and self-hosted Cube:

To learn more about hierarchies, check the documentation.

Folders

Folders are used to organize members of a view (e.g., dimensions, hierarchies, measures, etc.) into logical groups so you can easily navigate through them in your BI tool. For example, you can group all measures, dimensions, and hierarchies that constitute personally identifiable information (PII) into a PII folder:

views:
  - name: employee_details


    cubes:
      - join_path: employees
        includes:
          # List of members skipped for brevity


    folders:
      - name: Personally Identifiable Information
        includes:
          # Dimensions
          - first_name
          - last_name
          - email
          - phone
          # Hierarchies
          - location
          - business_unit
          # Measures
          - avg_salary
          - yoy_salary_growth

Similarly to hierarchies, Cube will only expose folders to BI tools that support them. Right now, you can use folders in Tableau with Semantic Layer Sync. Of course, you can build folders into your custom embedded analytics application, too.

To learn more about folders, check the documentation.

What's next?

Hierarchies and folders support is available in Cube Core and Cube Cloud starting from v1.2.0. We recommend upgrading to the latest version to take advantage of these features.

If you have any questions or feedback, reach out to us on Slack. Also, don't hesitate to request a demo or sign-up for Cube Cloud to get started with Cube in minutes.