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

Connecting to our PostgreSQL database in Metabase

Connecting to our database in Metabase is very similar to how we connected to it on the command line, except it is more user-friendly. To get started, open the admin panel in Metabase:

  1. From the top menu bar, click Databases.
  2. You should have one database already, the sample dataset that comes with Metabase.
  3. Click Add Database.
  4. PostgreSQL should be the default option from the dropdown. If not, choose it.
  5. For Name, enter Pies. This is just a user-friendly name that Metabase will use.
  6. Under Host, enter the endpoint from RDS.
  7. For Port, use 5432, which is the standard port for PostgreSQL traffic.
  8. The database name will be pies.
  9. The database username will be postgres.
  10. Enter the password you made when you created the database.
  11. Keep the Enabled slider on.
  12. Click Save.

At this point, Metabase will store the connection parameters for our database. It will automatically start scanning...