We had our first Cube community event on August 18th, and I'm excited to report that the event exceeded our expectations in many ways, including numbers of registrations (181) and attendees (96) plus the level of interactions with the attendees. We selected pre-aggregations as the topic for our first workshop based on how frequently it is discussed on our Slack and in our conversations with community members. So we were pretty confident that this would be a popular topic, but the level of participation was still beyond what we expected. If you missed the workshop, you can watch the recording on our YouTube channel and download the slides.
Before the event, I was a little concerned that attendees may not ask many questions, but I was proven wrong in the first 5 minutes as Q&A and Chat tabs were very active from the beginning. It was definitely nice to see that people were engaged and asked a lot of good questions throughout the workshop. The level of community engagement was also evident in the post-event survey, as we heard from nearly half of the attendees. In general, you're doing pretty well if you reach a 25% response rate on these surveys, so I'm heartened by how many people were willing to spend the time to provide us with feedback. In particular, there was some excellent open-ended feedback that will help us with our future events.
Pre-Aggregations Workshop Recap
We had a good mix of beginners and experienced Cube users in the workshop, so we thought it made sense to start off with some overview of pre-aggregations before diving into the hands-on lab. Our soon-to-be-released Cube Cloud provided a nice lab environment for the attendees, and it was great to see many following along and getting hands-on experience with pre-aggregations.
After a quick set up of pre-aggregations on our sample e-commerce database with about 30 million rows of data, we demonstrated the query time go down from about 9 seconds to about 0.1 seconds after pre-aggregations. We then delved into topics such as partitioning, refresh policy, and rollup joins that you need to consider when you use pre-aggregations. Finally, we discussed the production checklist that you can use as a reference if you are deploying your own Cube instance.
The Q&A sessions during the workshop were extremely valuable to us as they helped guide our discussions. In addition, many of these questions gave us a lot of good ideas on how we can improve our documentation and provide potential topics for future recipes or tutorials, so please stay tuned for some great content coming soon.
Next: Multitenancy Workshop in October
On the post-event survey, more than 70% of people requested multitenancy as a future workshop topic, so that will be the workshop topic on October 27th! The registration for the workshop is now open, so please feel free to sign up for other events today.
As with the pre-aggregation workshop, we included some optional survey questions in the registration form (including topics you want to see addressed). We encourage you to answer these questions to help ensure that we cover the topics you care about.
We hope to see many of you on October 27th!
