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

Chapter 6: Creating Questions

In the last chapter, we saw what our data looks like in Metabase and laid the groundwork to perform analytics. In this chapter, we will learn how to create questions. Questions in Metabase are exactly what they sound like. Are you curious to know how many orders we have at our fictional business? What about the number of users? In this chapter, we'll learn how to ask those questions in Metabase (and get the answers).

Questions are the fundamental building blocks of Metabase. Understanding how to create questions in Metabase will unlock all the actual analytical aspects of the product and open up key insights into our organization. As we work through the rest of the book, we'll learn that features in Metabase, such as dashboards and reports, are simply sets of questions.

There are several ways to create questions in Metabase, and in this chapter, we'll cover them all. The best way to learn about questions is to jump right in and start...