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

Specifying foreign key relationships

Recall in Chapter 4, Connecting to Databases, how we learned that the relational part of a relational database comes from how records in one table relate to other records. One of the benefits of this is to save space. To see an example of this, let's have another look at our Reviews table, or simply turn back to Figure 5.5. Notice that aside from the review ID and star rating, all other columns in our Reviews table relate to other tables:

  • The ID Order column relates to ID Order in the Orders table.
  • The ID Menu column relates to ID Menu in the Menu table.
  • The ID User column relates to ID User in the Users table.

Recall that when we first viewed our metadata for the Menu table, we saw that Metabase had determined that ID Menu was an Entity (or Primary) key. The same is true for ID Order in the Orders table and ID User in the Users table – they are all Entity keys. When we see an Entity key in a different table, as...