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

Customizing plots

Without it being our explicit goal, we created a line plot in Chapter 6, Creating Questions. When we took our Orders table and counted the rows by Created Date, Metabase guessed that we would want the data to be displayed as a line plot. In analytics, especially business analytics, line plots tend to be the most popular type of data visualization. That is because line plots are used to show time series data where data is summarized over intervals of time, such as days, weeks, months, quarters, or years.

When we came across this line plot in the last chapter, we simply saved it as a question and moved on. Let's now create another one and explore all the ways Metabase will let us customize our visualization. Let's get started.

In the last chapter, we looked at order growth over time. Now let's look at user growth over time. Since this involves a single table (Users), a single aggregation (Count of rows), and a single grouping (Created Date), we...