First look at Apache Superset from a PowerBI user perspective

Apache Superset is a very well known open source BI tool, I knew about it for the last couple of years, but was not thrilled by the idea of running a docker image on my laptop, recently though a new company Preset created by original author of the software start offering a cloud hosted service, basically they maintain the service and the consumer just use the software.

The pricing is very competitive, a free starter Plan with up to 5 users, then a pro plan for 20 $/Month/user ( the same as PowerBI PPU) and an Enterprise plan with custom pricing, kudos for the vendor for providing a free limited plan for users to learn and test.

The selling Point of Preset is very simple , it is open source software, so there is zero risk of vendor lock-in, if you are not happy with their service, you can always move your assets to another Provider or hosted yourself on-premise or in any cloud provider, this arguments is very attractive and make sense for a lot of customers , and companies like Red Hat have a good success using this business Model.

User interface

The user interface is simple and predictable which is a good thing, if you have used PowerBI or Data Studio you will feel at home.

Generally speaking there are two type of BI tools

• Integrated : The BI tools provide, ETL, Storage, Modeling and the viz layer , as an example : PowerBI, Tableau, Qlik , Data Studio
• Light : The BI tool scope is only Modeling and the viz layer, they need an External Database to host the data and run the SQL Query, Example Looker, Bipp etc ( I reference only the tool I personally used)

I guess the big assumption here, is that you have already a mature Data infrastructure which can be Queried from the same Data Base , Superset like Looker can not Query two DB in the same Dataset, The sweet spot for Superset is when all your data is hosted in a Cloud Data warehouse

Connecting to the Database

As usual I used BigQuery as my Data Source, the connection was pretty trivial to setup, although I could not figure out how to activate CSV upload

Building a Dataset

Dataset is the Data model it is the same concept as PowerBI with dimensions and Metrics (Measure), but it does not support relationships , you have to manually build a Query that join multiple tables or leverage a View in the Database , The metrics and dimension use SQL as calculation language.

One confusing aspect of the User interface; if you want to build a Dataset based on one table, you just click Data, Dataset then add Dataset, simple, but if you want to build it based on a SQL Query, you need to click on SQL Lab, then SQL Editor , you write the Query then save it as a dataset.

Example : Dataset based on A SQL Query and Parameter

I have a simple multi Fact semantic model in PowerBI, and usually used it as test case, 3 Facts with different grains and 3 dimension

I add this SQL Query to generate the Dataset, Parameter is used to pass date as a filter, yes I am biased, I used PowerBI for so long, that writing SQL Query to return Dataset seems strange.

{% set param_Date = filter_values('day')[0]  %}
SELECT category, commodity,  actualhours ,  budgethours ,  forecast
FROM (
  SELECT category, commodity , SUM(actualhours) AS actualhours
  FROM `testing-bi-engine.starschema.actual`
   WHERE date <= date(TIMESTAMP_MILLIS({{cache_key_wrapper(param_Date)}}))
  GROUP BY category, commodity
) t2
FULL OUTER JOIN (
  SELECT category, commodity , SUM(budgethours) AS budgethours
  FROM `testing-bi-engine.starschema.budget`
  GROUP BY category, commodity
) t3 USING(category, commodity)
FULL OUTER JOIN (
  SELECT category, commodity , SUM(forecast) AS forecast
  FROM `testing-bi-engine.starschema.baseline`
  WHERE date <= date(TIMESTAMP_MILLIS({{cache_key_wrapper(param_Date)}}))
  GROUP BY category, commodity
) t4 USING(category, commodity)

The metrics

The Columns

I am using BigQuery BI engine, one fact is 43 Million rows and another is 1 Million, and although Preset Cloud is hosted in AWS even with network transfer the experience is very smooth, as of this writing Publish to web is not supported yet, so all I can show is this GIF

Chart library

Apache Superset has a very decent visual library, the first I checked is Pivot table and it is not bad at all , my understanding cross filtering will be supported only on E Charts Viz

Take Away

Superset is a mature open source data consumption layer with an enterprise support provided by Preset Cloud, if you have a mature data infrastructure and you know SQL very well, then it is worth a shot, I suspect it will be very popular with tech savvy companies and startups.

Edit : added a new post about Superset SQL Metrics