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 maps

Representing geospatial data on a map is surprisingly simple in Metabase. Most of the time, it "just works." To see what I mean, let's try a quick example.

Creating a region map of users by US state

Let's look at the steps to create a region map of users by US state:

  1. Click Ask a Question.
  2. Click Custom question.
  3. In the Data section, choose Pies and Users.
  4. In Summarize, choose Count of Rows.
  5. In the Grouping section, choose State.
  6. Click Visualize.

This will return an attractive map of the US filled in with a blue gradient mapped to display the count of users in each state, just as in Figure 7.17. We can see that most of our users are in California, which makes sense because that is where we are headquartered! It's also the most populous state in the US. However, our plot shows that almost 4 times as many users are in California compared to Texas. We can see Wikipedia that California only has about 37% larger...