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

Chapter 4: Connecting to Databases

In this chapter, we will finally connect a database to Metabase and start exploring data. This chapter is all about databases. Metabase is designed to connect to most of today's most popular relational, NoSQL, and analytical databases, and we will learn a little about each one.

We will also learn how to launch our own PostgreSQL database and load it with the sample data we will be exploring throughout the rest of the book. In addition to preparing us with a dataset to use in future chapters, this chapter is intended to help you learn the best practices when working with databases.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • What is a database?
  • Creating a PostgreSQL database in AWS
  • Connecting to our PostgreSQL database in Metabase
  • Connecting to a database with best practices
  • Connecting to other types of databases in Metabase