Current progress: "Serverless BI"

The latest version of the project is available at mdsinabox.com. The website embraces the notion of "Serverless BI" - the pages are built asynchronously with open source software on commodity hardware and then pushed to a static site. The github action that automatically deploys the site upon PR can be found here.

MDS-in-a-box

This project serves as end to end example of running the "Modern Data Stack" on a single node. The components are designed to be "hot swappable", using Meltano to create clearly defined interfaces between discrete components in the stack. It runs in many enviroments with many visualization options. In addition, the data transformation documentation is self hosted on github pages.

Many Environments

It runs practically anywhere, and has been tested in the environments below.

Operating System	Local	Docker	Devcontainer	Docker in Devcontainer
Windows (w/WSL)	n/a	✅	✅	✅
Mac (Ventura)	✅	✅	✅	✅
Linux (Ubuntu 20.04)	✅	✅	✅	✅

Many Visualization Options

Apache Superset

Evidence.dev

1	2	3

This version can also be explored live at mdsinabox.com.

Rill Developer

Rill should be considered experimental - no dashboards have been defined yet!

Getting Started

Building MDS-in-a-box in Github Codespaces

Want to try MDS-in-a-box right away? Create a Codespace:

You can run in the Codespace by running the following command:

make build pipeline superset-visuals

You will need to wait for the pipeline to run and Superset configuration to complete. The 4-core codespace performs signifcantly better in testing, and is recommended for a better experience.

Once the build completes, you can access the Superset dashboard by clicking on the Open in Browser button on the Ports tab: and log in with the username and password: "admin" and "password".

Codespaces also supports "Docker-in-docker", so you can run docker inside the codespace with the following command:

make docker-build docker-run-superset

Building MDS-in-a-box in Windows

Create your WSL environment. Open a PowerShell terminal running as an administrator and execute:

wsl --install

If this was the first time WSL has been installed, restart your machine.

Open Ubuntu in your terminal and update your packages.

sudo apt-get update

Install python3.

sudo apt-get install python3.9 python3-pip python3.9-venv

clone the this repo.

mkdir meltano-projects
cd meltano-projects
git clone https://github.com/matsonj/nba-monte-carlo.git
# Go one folder level down into the folder that git just created
cd nba-monte-carlo

build your project

make build pipeline superset-visuals

Make sure to open up superset when prompted (default location is 127.0.0.1:8088). The username and password is "admin" and "password".

Using Docker and Kubernetes

You can build a docker container by running:

make docker-build

Then run the container using

make docker-run-superset

These are both aliases defined in the Makefile:

docker-build:
	docker build -t mdsbox .

docker-run:
	docker run \
		--publish 8088:8088 \
	 	--env MELTANO_CLI_LOG_LEVEL=WARNING \
		--env MDS_SCENARIOS=10000 \
		--env MDS_INCLUDE_ACTUALS=true \
		--env MDS_LATEST_RATINGS=true \
		--env MDS_ENABLE_EXPORT=true \
		--env ENVIRONMENT=docker \
		mdsbox make pipeline superset-visuals

You can then scale out to Kubernetes, assuming you have it installed:

kubectl apply -f ./kubernetes/pod.yaml

Notes on Design Choices

DuckDB as compute engine

Using DuckDB keeps install and config very simple - its a single command and runs everywhere. It also frankly covers for the sin of building a monte carlo simulation in SQL - it would be quite slow without the kind of computing that DuckDB can do.

Postgres was also considered in this project, but it is not a great pattern to run postgres on the same node as the rest of the data stack.

Using Parquet instead of a database

This project leverages parquet in addition to the DuckDB database for file storage. This is experimental and implementation will evolve over time - especially as both the DuckDB format continues to evolve and Iceberg/Delta support is added to DuckDB.

External Tables

dbt-duckdb supports external tables, which are parquet files exported to the data_catalog folder. This allows easier integration with Rill, for example, which can read the parquet files and transform them directly with its own DuckDB implementation.

What's next?

To-dos

clean up env vars + implement incremental builds
submit your PR or open an issue!

Source Data

The data contained within this project comes from 538, basketball reference, and draft kings.

zashirah/nba-monte-carlo