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

Technical requirements

To follow along, you'll just need a computer: macOS, Windows, or Linux are all adequate operating systems. You'll also want to create a Heroku account. Heroku is a cloud application platform we'll use to deploy Metabase at the end of the chapter. You can sign up for an account at https://www.heroku.com/.

Throughout this book, we'll be using a program called Git. Git is a version control system that helps track code changes in a project. Git has a high learning curve for beginners, and while we will not be covering any Git tutorials in this book, I intend to make the examples easy to follow. No prior knowledge of Git is required.

Often in this book, we'll use GitHub (https://github.com/) in conjunction with Git. GitHub is a code-hosting platform that relies heavily on the Git program. While Git helps you track changes to your code base, GitHub allows you to host that code online, so that others can access, edit, or contribute to...