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

What is a database?

While a thorough overview of databases is beyond the scope of this book, let's learn (or for some readers, refresh ourselves) about what databases are. According to Wikipedia, "a database is an organized collection of data, generally stored and accessed electronically from a computer system" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database). Databases have been around for decades, and today, there are many different types of databases for different use cases.

Traditionally, the most common type of database has been the relational database. Relational databases are made up of tables, which can be thought of as spreadsheets. Tables are rectangular, meaning they have rows and columns. The relational part comes from how the tables link to one another, as depicted in Figure 4.1. Note how in Figure 4.1, we have an orders table and an users table, linked together by id_user. Rather than store all the user information for each order (such as name...