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 bar plots, histograms, and row plots

In the last section, we customized a line plot. While we were customizing it, we saw that we could have easily changed it to a bar or area plot, without sacrificing much of the visualization's fidelity. This is because the three types of plots – line, bar, and area – are all very similar and share code architecture. They all put one dimension on the X axis and one or more dimensions on the Y axis. The most common dimension on the X axis for line and area plots is a time-based dimension, such as a date. That's not always the case for bar plots. Let's learn about them, and what kind of data works best for them. We'll also learn about row plots, which are simply just bar plots rotated 90 degrees.

When to use bar plots

You can always use a bar plot instead of a line plot. However, when you have a lot of data points on your X axis, it will result in a lot of bars. To see what I mean, try changing the...