An essential part of building a great data model is the ability to test and validate it. Within Cube, Playground is a powerful tool that allows you to interact with your data model, explore the data, and test queries. Ever since we've shipped Playground 2.0 a while ago, we've been continuously iterating on your feedback and enhancing the experience.
Today, we are happy to announce a new feature pack for Playground. It brings the support for the latest features in the data modeling layer (i.e., hierarchies and folders, custom granularities), advanced filtering capabilities, and additional querying options.
See new Playground features in action in this video:
These new features are available in Cube Core, starting from v1.2.0, and Cube Cloud. We recommend upgrading to the latest version to take advantage of them.
Support for data modeling features
Yesterday, we've announced the support for hierarchies and folders in the data modeling layer. While they are designed to help you organize and structure your data model in a way that feels native in your BI tools, you can also preview and interact with them in Playground.
Custom time dimension granularities were introduced to Cube's data modeling layer a while ago so that you can define granularities such as a fiscal year or a week starting on Sunday for any time dimension. If you use them, you can validate your queries in Playground, too.
Support for advanced filtering
Cube supports pretty complex filtering conditions that can include boolean logical operators. Now, you can build nested filtering conditions with unlimited depth in Playground, or load such queries there from Query History.
And when it comes to filters that accept values from your dataset, you can now look up the available values directly in Playground. It will run a query to fetch the distinct values for the selected member and display them in a dropdown:
Support for additional querying options
In the "Options" drop-down, you now set the limit and offset for your queries. You can also request that Playground runs an additional query to fetch the total count of rows that would have been returned as if the limit and offset were not applied. This is particularly useful if you're implementing pagination in your application.
And there are also smaller improvements, such as the tab actions to let you quickly duplicate the current query or drop all queries at once and start from scratch.
What's next?
Do you know what would make Playground even better? We'd love to hear your feedback and suggestions. Join the community Slack and start a conversation there!
Also, don't hesitate to try Playground yourself. You can sign up for Cube Cloud today (absolutely free), create a demo deployment, and get started right away.