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

Metabase's origins

Metabase began as an internal tool at Expa (https://www.expa.com), a start-up studio in San Francisco run by Garrett Camp, the co-founder of Uber. His CTO, Sameer Al-Sakran, had been working on simple ways to serve actionable data to CEOs and investors of companies in the Expa portfolio.

These start-ups needed an easy, low-cost, and low-friction way to understand their product data and measure things such as growth and engagement. It didn't take them long to realize that if the tools they were building were helpful for Expa's start-ups, they would probably be helpful to other start-ups, technology companies, and other organizations. They decided to turn this internal project into a company. Soon after, they put the source code for their project on GitHub, a website for collaborative software development that we'll rely on throughout this book. It became available for everyone to use, and Metabase was born.

On October 21, 2015, Metabase...