[Feature] Allow cumulative metrics without having to pre-define them

[siljamardla]

Is this your first time submitting a feature request?

• I have read the expectations for open source contributors
• I have searched the existing issues, and I could not find an existing issue for this feature
• I am requesting a straightforward extension of existing metricflow functionality, rather than a Big Idea better suited to a discussion

Describe the feature

Allow users to query cumulative values of metrics without developers having to pre-define the metrics.
If necessary, there can be additional configurations that specify which cumulative calculations to enable or disable.

Ideally, we would define a metric (some_metric) and we would immediately be able to query a cumulative version of that metric, something like this:

mf query --metircs some_metric,cumulative_7_day__some_metric --group-by metric_time

That is, the cumulation parameters would be query-time, not definition time.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Currently we have to pre-configure all the cumulative metrics we want to allow, which is limiting and code-intensive. For example:

  - name: some_metric_in_7_days
    label: some_metric_in_7_days
    description: ...
    type: cumulative
    type_params:
      measure: some_measure
      window: 7 days

to enable the 7-day cumulative and another one for every other window we want to allow.

Who will this benefit?

Everyone using metrics

Are you interested in contributing this feature?

Happy to provide context, sample use cases, brainstorm etc

Anything else?

No response