Superset Visualization - Get Your Data On

Big Data can quickly become a big problem and one of the challenges is simply making sense of massive volumes of information.  A good visualization tool is the key, the topic of this lil' post.

From the creators at Airbnb, yes....the same AirBnb that brings you the concept of couch surfing on a strangers chaise lounge, also creates an open-source tool that's worth a serious look at.  It's gone through a few names, originally named Panoramix, renamed to Caravel and again renamed to Superset a few months later so be on the lookout for alternative name references when doing your own readings.  Here is a good place to start; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Txm_nj_R7M

Let's follow through the installation process (performed on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS);

$ sudo sudo apt-get install -y build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev python-dev python-pip libsasl2-dev libldap2-dev

$ pip install --upgrade setuptools pip

$ sudo pip install superset



$ fabmanager create-admin --app superset

$ superset db upgrade

$ superset load_examples

$ superset init

At this stage, SuperSet should be fully installed with a number of examples.  SuperSet provides a web-interface that is accessible after running the server (as follows);

$ superset runserver

Point your browser to localhost:8088 and bask in your tech glory.  The interface provides a number of dashboards that demonstrate the visualization capabilities.

That's all for now, follow-on posts will explore Superset capabilities.  In the meantime, feel free to reference SuperSet's main documentation here; http://airbnb.io/projects/superset/