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

Connecting to a database with best practices

Up to this point, we've learned how to launch a PostgreSQL database with AWS, load data into it, and connect it to Metabase. If you plan on using Metabase in an existing organization, chances are that there will already be a database full of data for you. At the same time, it's unlikely that the database your organization uses to store data can be connected to in the same way as we learned previously. This is unlikely for two main reasons:

  • Most databases are not publicly accessible. Recall that in the last section, we made our database publicly accessible. That was to make loading data and connecting it to Metabase easy. Generally, it's a bad idea to make a database publicly accessible, as it lets anyone attempt to connect to it.
  • Doing analytics on a production application database is dangerous. Your application database is what is serving critical information to your application. Sending queries to it for analytical...