Aether Studio

ToolsGUISchemaDashboards

Beta Works · surface still evolving · Works · surface still evolving

What it is

Aether Studio is the desktop application for AetheriusDB. It runs as a native app on macOS, Windows, and Linux and stays responsive even with hundreds of schema nodes or visualizations with millions of points. It has three main workspaces: the Core Mapper for schema design, the UI Tesselator for dashboards, and a live telemetry profiler.

Why it matters

Studio folds schema design, dashboard building, and live profiling into one native app that reads your real catalog — so what you design, chart, and profile is always the actual database, not a diagram that drifted out of date. Because it subscribes to catalog changes, the canvas reflects edits made elsewhere the moment they happen.

• Three jobs, one tool — model schemas, build dashboards, and profile queries without switching apps.
• Always in sync — it works against the live catalog and live-subscribes to changes, so nothing goes stale.
• Native, not a web wrapper — a real desktop app on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

How fast it is

The native runtime stays responsive with hundreds of schema nodes or visualizations of millions of points, and paints its first frame in tens of milliseconds — there’s no embedded browser engine between you and the data.

Core Mapper — design schemas visually

The Core Mapper is a visual canvas where you lay out dimensions, measures, and cube relationships by dragging them into place rather than writing line-by-line schema scripts. Nodes represent dimensions (Time, Geography, Product), sinks represent measures (Sales, Click Count), and the layout you build is the source of truth: what you see is exactly what the database will create.

Connect Studio to a development cluster and changes from automation — for example a CI pipeline promoting a new dimension — appear in the canvas in real time. Saving the design ships an atomic schema change to the database. The canvas can also export the same design as a text manifest, so you can review it in Git alongside your source code.

-- Illustrative: the visual layout compiles to a declarative cube
-- definition. You can view or edit it as a text manifest for code review.
CUBE sales AS
  DIMENSIONS (
    time      TIMESTAMP,
    geography TEXT,
    product   BIGINT
  )
  MEASURES (
    revenue   DOUBLE AGGREGATE SUM,
    units     BIGINT AGGREGATE SUM
  );

flowchart LR
  A[Architect<br/>drag & drop] --> C[Studio Canvas]
  C --> M[Compiled<br/>schema change]
  M --> D[Catalog<br/>deploy]
  D --> DB[(AetheriusDB cluster)]
  DB -.live subscribe.-> C

Concept	What it does
Dimension node	An axis of the cube (Time, Geography, etc.). Drag from the palette onto the canvas.
Measure sink	A numeric column with an aggregation rule (sum, average, count).
Live subscribe	Receive catalog changes from the cluster so the canvas reflects external edits instantly.

Tip

Save your canvas designs alongside source code. The text manifest Studio produces is the same shape you would hand-write, so design reviews fit naturally into your normal pull-request flow.

Production clusters grant real rights

Pointing Studio at a production cluster grants real schema-modification rights. Use a dedicated development branch for exploratory designs and only merge into production through your normal review process.

UI Tesselator — build live dashboards

The Tesselator is a drag-and-drop dashboard builder. You drop a widget on the canvas — hex maps, grid views, pivot tables, line graphs — draw a connection line from a dimension to one of its axes, and the binding is created for you. The widgets are GPU-rendered and designed for spatial and high-cardinality data, so a hex map of a million cells or a pivot table with hundreds of thousands of rows stays smooth.

The output is a compiled application package: layout, widgets, and bindings baked into a small, self-contained dashboard you can share with colleagues. When opened it connects to the cluster, subscribes to its bound cubes, and renders live updates.

-- Illustrative: the visual layout compiles to a text manifest you
-- can review in source control.
DASHBOARD sales_pulse AS
  WIDGET heatmap   = HexMap(
    x = "sales.geography",
    y = "sales.time",
    intensity = "sales.revenue"
  )
  WIDGET trendline = LineGraph(
    x = "sales.time",
    y = "sales.revenue",
    refresh_ms = 100
  );

# Illustrative: build the dashboard into a deployable app package
aether-studio build dashboards/sales_pulse

Concept	What it does
Widget	A GPU-rendered display component (hex map, grid, line graph, pivot table).
Binding line	A visual connection from a dimension or measure to a widget input.
App package	A compiled, self-contained dashboard you can ship to colleagues.

Tip

Group related widgets into named panels in the canvas. The build step preserves panel structure as the dashboard’s navigation, so a tidy canvas becomes a tidy app.

Run in the browser, with live telemetry

Studio has two delivery forms. The native desktop app (hosted by the Luminous Container) is the high-performance default. For situations where installing a desktop app is awkward — a shared lab machine, a quick over-the-shoulder review, a locked-down corporate environment — the same Studio experience runs directly in a browser tab, served from your cluster. Open the URL and you have the full mapper, tesselator, and profiler.

Studio’s profiler is driven by a live telemetry feed from the database itself: per-query cardinality, IO latency, and batch ingest rate. Heatmaps light up where the engine is doing real work and timelines show ingest pulses arriving in real time — no separate metrics agent required. The same data is exposed through a SQL system view, so you can correlate Studio observations with ad-hoc queries or pipe it into an existing metrics stack.

-- Enable the telemetry feed once, on the cluster
ALTER SYSTEM SET enable_telemetry = true;

-- Query the same data Studio renders
SELECT node_id, operator, p99_ms
FROM system.telemetry
WHERE window_start > now() - INTERVAL '5 seconds';

# Open Studio in the browser
open https://my-cluster.example.com/studio

Telemetry is opt-in

Until enable_telemetry is set, the profiler views render empty. Review the privacy implications of streaming per-query counters in shared environments before enabling it.

Luminous Container →

The native runtime that hosts Studio and your dashboards.

Isomorphic Toolchain →

The text-first editor companion for hand-written logic.

Define Data →

The schema concepts Studio designs against.

Connect a Client →

Other ways to reach the database.