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)

Creating a visualization

That was smooth! You were able to add your first database and table to Superset. Now, it's time for the fun part, which is visualizing and analyzing the data. In Table, we will find the bigquery-public-data.stackoverflow.posts_questions listed as follows:

List Tables shows all available tables that can be used to make charts

When you click on it, it will take you to the chart UI:

Options available to modify the data visualized in the chart

Here, we will make a time series plot of the number of questions posted by year. In the Data tab, the Time section is used to restrict data by a temporal column value. We do not want to restrict data for the time series plot. We can clear the Since field.

In order to add axis labels to the line chart, select the Style tab and add descriptions in the X Axis Label and Y Axis Label fields:

Style form for the chart

Set year as Time Grain and COUNT(*) as the Metrics. Finally, hit Run Query:

Line chart showing total number of questions posted on Stack Overflow from 2008-2018

We have our first visualization! We can see how the number of questions grew quickly from 2008-2013. Now, Save the visualization, so that we can add it to our dashboard later:

A name and dashboard can be assigned to the chart on the Save form