Alternatives to Cube.js

I just finished the very first version of my new hobby project: #MovieGeeks. It is a minimalist online movie catalog for you to save the movies you want to see and for rating the movies you already saw. This is just the beginning as I am planning to add more features on the lines of sharing and discovery

For the #BackEnd I decided to use Node.js , GraphQL and MongoDB:

1. Node.js has a huge community so it will always be a safe choice in terms of libraries and finding solutions to problems you may have

2. GraphQL because I needed to improve my skills with it and because I was never comfortable with the usual REST approach. I believe GraphQL is a better option as it feels more natural to write apis, it improves the development velocity, by definition it fixes the over-fetching and under-fetching problem that is so common on REST apis, and on top of that, the community is getting bigger and bigger.

3. MongoDB was my choice for the database as I already have a lot of experience working on it and because, despite of some bad reputation it has acquired in the last months, I still believe it is a powerful database for at least a very long list of use cases such as the one I needed for my website

When I joined NYT there was already broad dissatisfaction with the LAMP (Linux Apache HTTP Server MySQL PHP) Stack and the front end framework, in particular. So, I wasn't passing judgment on it. I mean, LAMP's fine, you can do good work in LAMP. It's a little dated at this point, but it's not ... I didn't want to rip it out for its own sake, but everyone else was like, "We don't like this, it's really inflexible." And I remember from being outside the company when that was called MIT FIVE when it had launched. And been observing it from the outside, and I was like, you guys took so long to do that and you did it so carefully, and yet you're not happy with your decisions. Why is that? That was more the impetus. If we're going to do this again, how are we going to do it in a way that we're gonna get a better result?

So we're moving quickly away from LAMP, I would say. So, right now, the new front end is React based and using Apollo. And we've been in a long, protracted, gradual rollout of the core experiences.

React is now talking to GraphQL as a primary API. There's a Node.js back end, to the front end, which is mainly for server-side rendering, as well.

Behind there, the main repository for the GraphQL server is a big table repository, that we call Bodega because it's a convenience store. And that reads off of a Kafka pipeline.

Looking for the best analytics software for a medium-large-sized firm. We currently use a Microsoft SQL Server database that is analyzed in Tableau desktop/published to Tableau online for users to access dashboards. Is it worth the cost savings/time to switch over to using SSRS or Power BI? Does anyone have experience migrating from Tableau to SSRS /or Power BI? Our other option is to consider using Tableau on-premises instead of online. Using custom SQL with over 3 million rows really decreases performances and results in processing times that greatly exceed our typical experience. Thanks.

Looking for the best analytics software for a medium-large-sized firm. We currently use a Microsoft SQL Server database that is analyzed in Tableau desktop/published to Tableau online for users to access dashboards. Is it worth the cost savings/time to switch over to using SSRS or Power BI? Does anyone have experience migrating from Tableau to SSRS /or Power BI? Our other option is to consider using Tableau on-premises instead of online. Using custom SQL with over 3 million rows really decreases performances and results in processing times that greatly exceed our typical experience. Thanks.

Which among the two, Kyvos and Azure Analysis Services, should be used to build a Semantic Layer?

I have to build a Semantic Layer for the data warehouse platform and use Power BI for visualisation and the data lies in the Azure Managed Instance. I need to analyse the two platforms and find which suits best for the same.

We are a consumer mobile app IOS/Android startup. The app is instrumented with branch and Firebase. We use Google BigQuery. We are looking at tools that can support engagement and cohort analysis at an early stage price which we can grow with. Data Studio is the default but it would seem Looker provides more power. We don't have much insight into Amplitude other than the fact it is a popular PM tool. Please provide some insight.

We are a consumer mobile app IOS/Android startup. The app is instrumented with branch and Firebase. We use Google BigQuery. We are looking at tools that can support engagement and cohort analysis at an early stage price which we can grow with. Data Studio is the default but it would seem Looker provides more power. We don't have much insight into Amplitude other than the fact it is a popular PM tool. Please provide some insight.

Back in 2014, I was given an opportunity to re-architect SmartZip Analytics platform, and flagship product: SmartTargeting. This is a SaaS software helping real estate professionals keeping up with their prospects and leads in a given neighborhood/territory, finding out (thanks to predictive analytics) who's the most likely to list/sell their home, and running cross-channel marketing automation against them: direct mail, online ads, email... The company also does provide Data APIs to Enterprise customers.

I had inherited years and years of technical debt and I knew things had to change radically. The first enabler to this was to make use of the cloud and go with AWS, so we would stop re-inventing the wheel, and build around managed/scalable services.

For the SaaS product, we kept on working with Rails as this was what my team had the most knowledge in. We've however broken up the monolith and decoupled the front-end application from the backend thanks to the use of Rails API so we'd get independently scalable micro-services from now on.

Our various applications could now be deployed using AWS Elastic Beanstalk so we wouldn't waste any more efforts writing time-consuming Capistrano deployment scripts for instance. Combined with Docker so our application would run within its own container, independently from the underlying host configuration.

Storage-wise, we went with Amazon S3 and ditched any pre-existing local or network storage people used to deal with in our legacy systems. On the database side: Amazon RDS / MySQL initially. Ultimately migrated to Amazon RDS for Aurora / MySQL when it got released. Once again, here you need a managed service your cloud provider handles for you.

Future improvements / technology decisions included:

Caching: Amazon ElastiCache / Memcached CDN: Amazon CloudFront Systems Integration: Segment / Zapier Data-warehousing: Amazon Redshift BI: Amazon Quicksight / Superset Search: Elasticsearch / Amazon Elasticsearch Service / Algolia Monitoring: New Relic

As our usage grows, patterns changed, and/or our business needs evolved, my role as Engineering Manager then Director of Engineering was also to ensure my team kept on learning and innovating, while delivering on business value.

One of these innovations was to get ourselves into Serverless : Adopting AWS Lambda was a big step forward. At the time, only available for Node.js (Not Ruby ) but a great way to handle cost efficiency, unpredictable traffic, sudden bursts of traffic... Ultimately you want the whole chain of services involved in a call to be serverless, and that's when we've started leveraging Amazon DynamoDB on these projects so they'd be fully scalable.