Superset Roadmap�
Meetup Nov 11, 2020
Intros
Agenda
Where did Superset come from?
Initially, Superset was born out of a hackathon project.
As an Open Source project it gained popularity quickly in the data teams of many modern, data driven companies.
It has proven itself in enterprise, at petabyte scale and it has become the tool of choice for “post-modern” data teams
What is Superset?
Visual Exploration
Dashboards
Data source connectivity
SQL IDE
The opportunity
Superset has the potential to:
The “tipping point” is near
Nr. of Pull Requests per year in the repo
2016 - 2020
2021
0.38
1.0
→
Defining Superset 1.0
Long list of 50+ projects
Key driver: user impact / engineering effort aka. “low hanging fruits”
Superset 1.0 - Main product themes
User Experience Improvement: simpler, more intuitive UI
New features: Discovery & Navigation, Visualizations, Sharing and Collaboration
Developer Experience Improvement: make it easier for developers to build, deploy and maintain Superset functionality
Performance: enhance Superset scalability and efficiency
1.0 Projects
Performance
Other
Developer Experience
New features
User Experience Improvement
Roadmap
Roadmap documents
1.0 Highlights
Single Page Application
Component Library
User Experience
Improvements
Card layout
Native dashboard filter component
Filter status indicator
Explore control panel and time picker
Query result preview
Improve SQL Lab to Explore flow
Visualizations
Visualization Plugin Architecture
Echarts integration and annotation
Dynamic viz plugin imports
Discovery & Navigation
Sharing & Collaboration
Alerts & Reports
Developer Experience
Performance
Global Async Query support
Home Screen
Global Search
User Experience Improvements
Card layout
Present list of Charts and Dashboards in a new format, using a grid of thumbnails. Makes it easier to discover and find Charts and Dashboards, especially when there is a lot of them in your Superset instance
Explore Controls
Visualization controls are being updated to create a more consistent and modernized interface. Refactoring will include updates to the content/labeling/ordering of these controls as well as updating their styling and simplifying their interactions and layout. This will line us up for features like drag-and-drop controls, and dynamically populated control inputs.
Improve SQL Lab to Explore flow
Gives users the ability to create and name a new dataset or update an existing dataset when moving from SQL Lab to Explore. When going back to SQL Lab, the underlying query for the dataset will be shown, allowing users to easily make changes and update their dataset when moving between SQL Lab and Explore.
Card view
User Experience Improvements
Filter Status Indicators
Charts on dashboards have been updated to concisely show which filters are in scope, have been applied, or are in error.
Context around filter changes has been increased, by highlighting scoped charts when a filter is selected, and increasing visibility of charts with incompatible filters applied.
User Experience Improvements
Native Dashboard Filter Component
Unlike many other BI tools in the market, our current dashboard filter lives as a chart, which needs to be created in the Explore view, and added to dashboard as a chart/component. To improve the usability and user experience, we are introducing a new dashboard filter as a dashboard-native component, allowing users to create, add, and edit filters quickly at the dashboard level.
Data Visualizations
Visualization Plugin Architecture
Data viz plugins are now easier to build, test, style, and configure. They can now be built in a single repository, in a single language. They’re powered by a new, extensible API, and largely decoupled from Superset for ease of development and maintenance.
Dynamic viz plugin imports
This will allow Superset to load data visualization plugins as stand-alone Javascript bundles, hosted anywhere on the internet, allowing developers to more easily use or share their custom plugins, as well as enabling Superset users to easily load custom plugins on-demand
Data Visualizations
Echarts integration
Superset has adopted Apache ECharts (incubating) as the core library for new visualizations. It offers powerful charting and visualization capabilities, with intuitive, interactive, and highly customizable charts. It will replace or augment legacy plugins in phases, to increase both visual and code consistency. Completed charts include a new unified Time-Series chart, Pie Chart and Box Plot.
Data Visualizations
Echarts Annotations
Along with the Echarts integration, we are also introducing a better set of annotation features. Formula annotation, which allows users to plot any mathematical function on the chart; Interval and Event annotations, will allow users to add context to the trent in Time-Series; and Line annotation, which use a predefined chart as the source of annotation.
Discovery & Navigation
Home Screen
A personalized landing page that the user sees when they log into Superset. It shows items relevant to the user (Charts, Dashboards, Saved Queries, etc) and serves as a hub to discover content and access recent items quickly.
Discovery & Navigation
Global Search
Gives users the ability to access search from all pages in the app to search across databases, datasets, charts, dashboards, and queries. This will be a first step towards a more robust search experience.
Sharing & Collaboration
Alerts & Reports
Alerts are used to trigger a notification when a metrics reaches a threshold. Reports are schedule driven delivery of a Chart or Dashboard snapshot. We are building a more intuitive UI for these features as well as a robust backend.
Developer Experience
Single Page Application
Superset is currently built as a suite of separate React applications, each bundled, served, and loaded as separate pages. This upgrade will allow Superset to be loaded in a single page, enabling snappier response times when transitioning between areas of Superset, and enabling higher component reusability and tighter integration between Superset features.
Component library
This effort is an attempt to modernize, consolidate, and simplify the interface elements of Superset , benefiting the user, the developer, and the designer. Highly-used components being visually updated, refactored to modern component libraries, integrated with React Storybook for immediate visibility, and consolidated with their test/styles. This will ease developer experience and create a more consistent and modern aesthetic throughout the user experience.
Performance
Global Async Query support
Enable asynchronous data loading for charts (dashboards, Explore) and SQL Lab. This will improve performance and user experience when loading query results, especially when there are many charts in a Dashboard or when queries are long running.
Beyond 1.0
An open roadmap
Roadmap collaboration
Q & A