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

Asking a simple question

Asking a simple question in Metabase will feel very familiar to you since it's nearly identical to what we've already done using the Browse Data feature. Simple questions generally have four components to them:

  • A single table
  • An optional filter
  • An optional aggregation to summarize by
  • An optional grouping

Let's consider our first question: how many orders have been placed?

The table

A simple question will always start with a single table from our database. In this case, it's going to be the Orders table. This is because we want to know how many orders have been placed, and each row in the Orders table is an order.

To select the Orders table, click Ask a Question:

  1. Click Simple question.
  2. Click the Pies database icon.
  3. Click the Orders table.

You should see a full table view, just like when we browsed the data in Chapter 5, Building Your Data Model.

Important Note

Although the Simple...