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

Creating a PostgreSQL database in AWS

In this section, we'll be creating a PostgreSQL database in AWS, downloading a utility called psql to connect to it, and finally, loading some sample data into it. Let's get started.

PostgreSQL is a popular open source database. It's actually what is running behind the scenes in our Metabase instance as the application database. In that case, it was created automatically by the Elastic Beanstalk configuration. Here, we will create one from scratch, using Relational Database Service (RDS) in AWS. Let's get started:

Important Note

You get 750 hours of RDS a month on the Free Tier. Since we're already using one of these to power our Elastic Beanstalk app, you will now be charged if you leave both running all month long. As of the time of writing, a db.t2.micro instance costs around USD 0.03 per hour.

  1. Log in to AWS as the metabase-admin IAM user and find the RDS service in the AWS Management Console.
  2. Click...