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

Defining segments and metrics

In the last section, we learned how to edit the metadata for our columns and define our foreign key relationships. The main purpose of all of that work was to make for an easier and more intuitive user experience for people less technical than us. In this section, we'll expand on that, using two useful features that Metabase offers: segments and metrics. Let's learn about segments first.

Defining segments

Simply put, a segment in Metabase is a named filter on a table. They can be quite powerful, though, as often, a name is much easier to remember than the filtering logic behind it. Let's explain this with an example.

Consider our fictional business, Pickles and Pies. Internally, we may have teams that only focus on the pickle part of the business, and other teams that handle the pie side of things. When looking up stats about sales, review ratings, and repeat orders, people in our organization may only care about the stats for either...