Universal semantic layer defining metrics once and serving them to every BI consumer.
Cube is a semantic layer that sits between the data warehouse and everything that consumes metrics — BI dashboards, embedded customer- facing analytics, and increasingly AI agents. Teams define measures and dimensions once, in code, and Cube serves consistent numbers through SQL, REST, and GraphQL APIs with caching, pre-aggregation, and access control. In a revenue stack it is how usage and revenue metrics come to mean the same thing in every tool: the definition of billable usage or net revenue lives in one governed place instead of five dashboards.
Which of the capability map's modules Cube (semantic layer) covers — each links to the module's own page, with every tool that supports it.
| Module | Phase | Depth | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fulfill & Bill | |||
| SQL-Based Billable Metrics | Consume & Meter | Core | Defines the governed usage metric; rating and invoicing happen in downstream billing systems. |
| Grow Revenue | |||
| Custom Report Builder | Platform & Intelligence | Partial | Powers report builders and embedded analytics via API rather than shipping an end-user reporting UI of its own. |
It is consumer-agnostic and headless — not welded to one BI vendor — and its caching layer makes it practical to expose governed metrics inside your own product, not just to internal analysts. That embedded, API-first posture is what separates it from BI-native semantic layers.
No — it is the layer BI tools sit on. Cube holds the metric definitions and answers queries; visualization happens in whatever consumes it, from Looker-style dashboards to charts embedded in your product. The payoff is that every consumer reports the same number.
It can define and serve the metric — say, billable API calls per account per month, computed from warehouse events — but it does not rate against a price book or generate invoices. Teams pair a warehouse-plus-semantic-layer metric definition with a billing engine that consumes the aggregate.