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

Caching queries

The data that we've been working with in the pies database is relatively small. The number of rows per table is in the tens or hundreds of thousands. What's more, the queries we've been running have been relatively inexpensive. When I refer to them as inexpensive, I mean in terms of compute power. With relatively small data, a powerful PostgreSQL database, and a scalable Metabase environment all living in the same VPC, we have not had to deal with the most common pain point in analytics: slow-running queries.

Unfortunately, slow-running queries are unavoidable in the real world. This is especially true when you grant query privileges to everyone, or at least most, in your organization. The cost of opening up your data to everyone is that people are going to write some…how do you say it, creative queries. Fortunately, Metabase offers a caching feature to help minimize any pain points that crop up around waiting for poorly optimized or expensive...