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

Editing your data model

In Chapter 4, Connecting to Databases, we created a database with data about our fictional business and connected it to Metabase. If you followed along with everything in Chapter 4, Connecting to Databases, you should have two databases connected to Metabase, just like in Figure 5.1:

Figure 5.1 – The two databases connected to Metabase

Figure 5.1 – The two databases connected to Metabase

In this section, we will learn how to customize our database's data model. Before we do that, it might be helpful to take a quick tour of our database in Metabase so that we gain some familiarity with it. Let's get started.

Touring the Pies database in Metabase

In Chapter 4, Connecting to Databases, we only spent a little time exploring the actual data in our Pies database. Before we go ahead and refine our data model, let's get to know the tables and contents of this database. To get started, have Metabase open:

  1. Click Browse Data on the top blue bar.
  2. Select...