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 permissions

Permissions either allow or prevent groups of users from accessing certain data. Metabase has a simple philosophy around permissions, which they outlined in a blog post back in 2016 when they introduced the feature (https://www.metabase.com/blog/Permissions/). Unlike some analytics products, which give extremely fine-grained and complex permission capabilities down to the individual record, Metabase keeps it high level. They do, however, offer more fine-grained permissions in their Enterprise version.

In Metabase, permissions are not applied at the user level, but rather at the group level. So, before we learn about permissions, let's learn about groups.

Creating user groups

Groups allow you to organize sets of users. The purpose of creating groups is to control permissions around the viewing of certain databases, tables, or columns. For example, a good practice is to restrict the access of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), such as full names...