Book Image

Metabase Up and Running

By : Tim Abraham
Book Image

Metabase Up and Running

By: Tim Abraham

Overview of this book

Metabase is an open source business intelligence tool that helps you use data to answer questions about your business. This book will give you a detailed introduction to using Metabase in your organization to get the most value from your data. You’ll start by installing and setting up Metabase on your local computer. You’ll then progress to handling the administration aspect of Metabase by learning how to configure and deploy Metabase, manage accounts, and execute administrative tasks such as adding users and creating permissions and metadata. Complete with examples and detailed instructions, this book shows you how to create different visualizations, charts, and dashboards to gain insights from your data. As you advance, you’ll learn how to share the results with peers in your organization and cover production-related aspects such as embedding Metabase and auditing performance. Throughout the book, you’ll explore the entire data analytics process—from connecting your data sources, visualizing data, and creating dashboards through to daily reporting. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to implement Metabase as an integral tool in your organization.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Installing and Deploying Metabase
4
Section 2: Setting Up Your Instance and Asking Questions of Your Data
12
Section 3: Advanced Functionality and Paid Features

Introduction to SQL in Metabase

After spending time learning Metabase's notebook data editor, you might be wondering what the pros and cons of using SQL instead are. If you are using a relational database with Metabase, all questions that can be created with the notebook editor can be expressed with SQL instead. The reverse of that statement is not true. Only some questions expressed with SQL can be created with the notebook editor. There are many functions and operations that can be carried out with SQL that don't exist in the notebook editor. This will likely change over time, as the Metabase team is constantly improving the notebook editor, but for the time being, having a solid background in SQL means you can ask questions that would not be possible to express in the notebook editor.

Just because any question created in the notebook can be written in SQL, does not mean that all questions should be written in SQL. There are benefits to using the notebook editor instead...