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

Building your data dictionary

To discover all the metadata, table descriptions, and column descriptions we've added, Metabase uses a feature called the data reference. In addition to showing most of the metadata we've added, the data dictionary has room to enrich user comprehension about our database, tables, segments, and metrics even more. The idea behind the data reference is that if a new user creates a Metabase account but has no context about what any of the databases or tables are, they should be able to easily look up key information to help them get started.

Our Pies database is relatively easy to understand, but you can imagine how this is an exception rather than the rule. Organizations store all kinds of data, often in strange ways. For example, I once worked at a company that stored all of its most important analytical data in a database called temp. They had a difficult time explaining to new hires that the temp database was the one with the actual important...