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 a native query

In the last section, we learned how to create custom questions using Metabase's notebook editor. As we saw, the editor is quite powerful. With it, you can do all of the standard analytical database operations, such as filtering, summarizing, grouping, transforming, and joining – all by clicking. This is incredibly useful, both for a seasoned data analyst and for someone new to data. I find that it's also useful as an educational tool for those new to analytics and curious to learn more. It's easy to open a saved question and flip to the editor to see the "recipe" and learn how it was created.

Of course, as powerful as the editor is, there will always be some questions that it can't answer. The Metabase team is constantly adding features to cover more and more use cases, but addressing every single function for every supported database is a tall order. But for every use case that the editor cannot address, Metabase offers...