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

Summary

In this chapter, we finally got to explore our data in Metabase. After a brief tour, we spent a lot of the chapter in the Admin Panel learning how to enhance the metadata of our database and its tables. By adding descriptions, curating our field settings, and specifying foreign key relationships, we give users in our organization a better chance of finding what they want – and help them avoid making mistakes. All they need to do to get started is open the data reference!

We also learned how to restrict access to sensitive databases and data tables using permissions and groups.

Aside from all that, we got several glimpses of what Metabase actually does. Inadvertently, by browsing data, filtering it, and making metrics and segments, we introduced ourselves to some of the basic capabilities Metabase has to offer.

In the next chapter, we'll learn how to create questions – the main building blocks for everything in Metabase. Much of it will look familiar...