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

Asking questions in Metabase

Let's start by understanding what a question is. A question is anything that causes Metabase to execute a database query on your connected data sources and return data. That means that anything that returns data from our database is considered a question, which also means that we've already created a few questions. Recall that in Chapter 5, Building Your Data Model, we spent some time browsing our database tables and applied some filters to them. In the background, Metabase was taking these commands, translating them into SQL queries, executing them, and returning the results. Even those simple actions, since they returned data, would technically be considered questions.

Questions become valuable once they return meaningful data and are saved. Let's illustrate this with a simple example, building upon what we learned in the last chapter.

Saving your first question

To get used to creating and saving questions, let's make a very...