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 5: Building Your Data Model

Metabase has several features that allow you to create helpful layers of metadata on top of your database to make it more user-friendly to work with. Metadata is data about data. If you have ever struggled with ugly or oddly formatted fields in a database, or been perplexed by a certain data type, you know this pain point. You can imagine that these pain points are all the worse for the less technical users in your organization. By investing a little time upfront to properly define your columns, data types, table relationships, descriptions, and permissions, you can greatly improve comprehension and usability for others in your organization.

In addition to adding metadata to enhance your database, Metabase also allows you to hide parts of your data that are either irrelevant or highly sensitive. This will all be covered in this chapter.

Specifically, in this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

  • Editing your...