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 custom question

In the last section, we learned that the Simple question feature offers ways to build a question based on a single table and an optional filter, summary function, and grouping. This will work great for many of your most important questions, but it will only be a matter of time until the complexities of your question can no longer be addressed by the Simple question feature. When that happens, your next best option is the Custom question feature. Let's learn about it and answer the second question, Who are our top customers?

First off, let's think about what a "top customer" is. Are they our customers with the most orders? The most items ordered? The most money spent? The most money spent in the last 90 days? As analysts and data scientists, we are all too familiar with seemingly simple questions turning out to be too vague and underdefined. For now, let's define our top customers as those with the most orders, and limit those customers...