9 Comments
May 20, 2022·edited May 20, 2022Liked by Benn Stancil

"it looks like the API lets people request metrics over date ranges, with filters, and grouped by different dimensions." This is really important and something I've been thinking about with metrics layers. Some metrics - especially financial metrics - are in the form of ratios, such as ROI. These can only be calculated after the user has selected their dimensions, as the numerator and denominator values of the ratio can vary independently depending on the dimensions selected. In other words they cannot be pre-calculated and stored (unless you try and store all permutations of dimension combinations) So any metrics layer needs to be able to receive the dimensional selection from the end user tool and calculate the metric on the fly. In older days we used to do this by implementing such metrics in the semantic layer or in database views.

Expand full comment

The Minerva API does speak SQL which we use with Superset (see the "Metrics for the Masses" section in https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/supercharging-apache-superset-b1a2393278bd). Note we're in the process of writing the third blog in the series which will describe this in more detail.

Expand full comment