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

X-raying your data

X-rays are Metabase's way of guessing what's important about your data and creating a dashboard of questions for you. They take advantage of the fact that most questions involve either counting rows or summing a numeric column, grouping by a date column, and potentially grouping by another low cardinality column. The actual feature is more complex than that, involving some machine learning behind the scenes, but that's generally how they work.

While I don't believe that x-rays are an adequate replacement for a curious data scientist, I do think they're useful when used by a curious data scientist. Because x-rays are simple to create and fast to materialize, they make for a good base layer of simple questions that you can use or build upon to make more complex questions. Let's see an example.

Creating an x-ray

To get started, click Browse Data | Pies. Note that as you hover over each table in the pies database, an icon of a...