Book Image

Apache Superset Quick Start Guide

By : Shashank Shekhar
Book Image

Apache Superset Quick Start Guide

By: Shashank Shekhar

Overview of this book

Apache Superset is a modern, open source, enterprise-ready business intelligence (BI) web application. With the help of this book, you will see how Superset integrates with popular databases like Postgres, Google BigQuery, Snowflake, and MySQL. You will learn to create real time data visualizations and dashboards on modern web browsers for your organization using Superset. First, we look at the fundamentals of Superset, and then get it up and running. You'll go through the requisite installation, configuration, and deployment. Then, we will discuss different columnar data types, analytics, and the visualizations available. You'll also see the security tools available to the administrator to keep your data safe. You will learn how to visualize relationships as graphs instead of coordinates on plain orthogonal axes. This will help you when you upload your own entity relationship dataset and analyze the dataset in new, different ways. You will also see how to analyze geographical regions by working with location data. Finally, we cover a set of tutorials on dashboard designs frequently used by analysts, business intelligence professionals, and developers.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Summary

That must have felt productive, since we were able to create our dashboard from nothing in Superset.

Before we summarize what we have just finished in this chapter, it is important that we discuss when Superset might not be the right visualization tool for a data analysis project.

Visualization of data requires data aggregation. Data aggregation is a function of one or more column values in tables. A group by operation is applied on a particular column to create groups of observations, which are then replaced with the summary statistics defined by the data aggregation function. Superset provides many data aggregation functions; however, it has limited usability when hierarchical data aggregation is required for visualizations.

Hierarchical data aggregation is the process of taking a large amount of rows in a table and displaying summaries of partitions and their sub-partitions. This is not an option in Superset for most of the visualizations.

Also, Superset has limited customization options on the design and formatting of visualizations. It supports changes in color schemes and axis label formatting. Individuals or teams who want to tinker and optimize the visual representation of their data will find Superset very limited for their needs.

Finally, it's time to summarize our achievements. We have been able to install Superset, add a database, create a dashboard, and share it with users. We are now ready to add additional databases and tables, and create new visualizations and dashboards. Exploring data and telling data stories with Superset dashboards is one of your skill sets now!