Cubes Backend Progress and Comparison

I've been working on a new SQL backend for cubes called StarBrowser. Besides new features and fixes, it is going to be more polished and maintainable.

Current Backend Comparison

In the following table you can see comparison of backends (or rather aggregation browsers). Current backend is sql.browser which reqiures denormalized table as a source. Future preferred backend will be sql.star.

Document link at Google Docs.

Star Browser state

More detailed description with schemas and description of what is happening behind will be published once the browser will be useable in most of the important features (that is, no sooner than drill-down is implemented). Here is a peek to the new browser features.

• separated attribute mapper - doing the logical-to-physical mapping. or in other words: knows what column in which table represents what dimension attribute or a measure
• more intelligent join building - uses only joins that are relevant to the retrieved attributes, does not join the whole star/snowflake if not necessary
• allows tables to be stored in different database schemas (previously everything had to be in one schema)

There is still some work to be done, including drill-down and ordering of results.

You can try limited feature set of the browser by using sql.star backend name. Do not expect much at this time, however if you find a bug, I would be glad if report it through github issues. The source is in the cubes/backends/sql/star.py and cubes/backends/sql/common.py (or here).

New and improved

Here is a list of features you can expect (not yet fully implemented, if at all started):

• more SQL aggregation types and way to specify what aggregations should be used by-default for each measure
• DDL schema generator for: denormalized table, logical model - star schema, physical model
• model tester - tests whether all attributes and joins are valid in the physical model

Also the new implementation of star browser will allow easier integration of pre-aggregated store (planned) and various other optimisations.