Overview
Cube (formerly Cube.js) is the market-leading semantic layer designed to sit between your data sources and downstream applications. By 2026, Cube has evolved into the critical infrastructure for 'Headless BI,' enabling teams to define their data models and business logic in a centralized location that serves every consumer: from internal BI tools like Tableau to custom-built SaaS dashboards and LLM-powered agents. The architecture is built on four core pillars: Semantic Modeling (defining metrics in YAML/JS), Security (centralized row-level access control), Caching (utilizing pre-aggregations for sub-second performance), and a Multi-protocol API (SQL, REST, and GraphQL). This decoupling of the data model from the visualization layer eliminates metric drift, ensuring that a single metric—like Monthly Recurring Revenue—is calculated identically across all platforms. In the era of AI, Cube serves as the essential 'Context Layer' for LLMs, providing a structured, governed interface for natural language queries against complex data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks.