Metabase Up and Running

Introduce business intelligence and analytics to your company and make better business decisions

Tim Abraham

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781800203143
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Datenverarbeitung

Ask questions of your data and gain insights to make better business decisions using the open source business intelligence tool, Metabase

Key Features

• Deploy Metabase applications to let users across your organization interact with it
• Learn to create data visualizations, charts, reports, and dashboards with the help of a variety of examples
• Understand how to embed Metabase into your website and send out reports automatically using email and Slack

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Explore different types of databases and find out how to connect them to Metabase
• Deploy and host Metabase securely using Amazon Web Services
• Use Metabase's user interface to filter and aggregate data on single and multiple tables
• Become a Metabase admin by learning how to add users and create permissions
• Answer critical questions for your organization by using the Notebook editor and writing SQL queries
• Use the search functionality to search through tables, dashboards, and metrics

Who this book is for

This book is for business analysts, data analysts, data scientists, and other professionals who want to become well-versed with business intelligence and analytics using Metabase. This book will also appeal to anyone who wants to understand their data to extract meaningful insights with the help of practical examples. A basic understanding of data handling and processing is necessary to get started with this book.

Section 1: Installing and Deploying Metabase

In this section, you will learn what Metabase is and why it was created as an open source business intelligence tool. You'll install a local version of Metabase and learn why hosted versions are necessary for use in an organization. Then, you'll learn how to deploy hosted versions using popular methods.

This section contains the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Overview of Metabase
• Chapter 2, Hosting Metabase on AWS

Chapter 1: Overview of Metabase

Metabase is a free and open source analytics software that allows you and everyone in your organization to ask questions of your data, create visualizations and dashboards, send out daily reporting, and much more.

Traditionally, organizations with good analytics either had to pay for expensive enterprise software, employ a cadre of data scientists and data engineers, or both. The value of analytics was high but the barrier to entry was even higher. Today, the value of analytics continues to grow, but the introduction of software such as Metabase has lowered the barrier to entry. This book will teach you, regardless of your background in analytics and engineering, how to create a robust and scalable analytics environment for your organization using Metabase.

This chapter will be a gentle introduction to Metabase, where we'll learn what it is and how to install it. We will then learn about more powerful, cloud-based installation methods that allow for collaboration. By the end of the chapter, you will learn how to deploy your own instance of Metabase to the cloud.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:

• Introducing Metabase
• Metabase's origins
• Why open source?
• Installing Metabase locally
• Installing and deploying Metabase via the cloud

Technical requirements

To follow along, you'll just need a computer: macOS, Windows, or Linux are all adequate operating systems. You'll also want to create a Heroku account. Heroku is a cloud application platform we'll use to deploy Metabase at the end of the chapter. You can sign up for an account at https://www.heroku.com/.

Throughout this book, we'll be using a program called Git. Git is a version control system that helps track code changes in a project. Git has a high learning curve for beginners, and while we will not be covering any Git tutorials in this book, I intend to make the examples easy to follow. No prior knowledge of Git is required.

Often in this book, we'll use GitHub (https://github.com/) in conjunction with Git. GitHub is a code-hosting platform that relies heavily on the Git program. While Git helps you track changes to your code base, GitHub allows you to host that code online, so that others can access, edit, or contribute to it. The Metabase project lives on GitHub. That means that if you wanted to, you could contribute to the building of Metabase. Later in this book, we'll learn how you can get involved in that, even if you don't know how to program.

There is a GitHub repository for this book, too, at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Metabase-Up-and-Running. I'll use this repository to share code examples and data useful to you as you work through the examples in the book.

Introducing Metabase

Before we get started, let's learn about what Metabase is and how it came to be. Metabase is software for analytics. Traditionally, we might refer to it as software for Business Intelligence, or BI. BI generally refers to software that aids in transforming data into actionable insights and visualizations. BI software has been around for a long time; Tableau and MicroStrategy are traditional examples. Today, many people in the industry, myself included, prefer the term analytics software over BI. I will be using that term going forward.

Finding answers in your database

Today, all organizations rely on analytics to stay competitive. As a famous saying goes, "you can't manage what you can't measure." Imagine you are a company selling products online and want to measure the number of products you have sold. While that seems like a simple question, many would have no idea of how to actually arrive at a number. Would you manually count the number of units leaving your warehouse? Sure, you could, but it seems like there should be an easier way – and there is. Most organizations rely on databases to store their transactions, so getting your transaction data from your database is generally the easiest and most accurate way to measure your sales.

The downside to databases is that they can be intimidating to work with. Connecting to them is often challenging due to security and technical reasons. Plus, once you connect to them you need to know how to query them. Most databases can be queried with Structured Query Language, or SQL, but not everyone knows (or should know) SQL. Once you get your query to work, turning the raw data from the query results into something interpretable, such as a chart, is something that databases are no good for – you need additional software to visualize your data.

So, while viewing the number of sales in your organization seems simple, it's actually far from that. This is where Metabase helps.

Metabase was made to connect to all of today's most popular databases. While users with more of a technical background can use SQL with Metabase, it also has a well-designed query builder so that knowledge of SQL is not required. Furthermore, Metabase has a terrific visualization library. Going from query to visualization is often as simple as the click of a button. Metabase makes it easy and intuitive to go from a question in your head, such as the number of sales over time, to a visualization of the answer such as that shown in Figure 1.1:

Figure 1.1 – Counting transactions with Metabase's sample dataset

Now that we've learned what Metabase is, let's learn about who it was built for.

Who should use Metabase?

Metabase is designed for all roles in an organization, not just data scientists, analysts, or engineers. You don't need to be highly technical or highly analytical to find value in Metabase. From what I've witnessed, there are four types of Metabase users. I have represented them in Figure 1.2, a two-by-two matrix with shading as a third dimension:

Figure 1.2 – The four types of Metabase users

Going back to our example question of sales over time, let's see the roles these four types of users might play:

1. Admins make sure Metabase is up to date and running smoothly. They are the ones who install Metabase and give everyone a login. It is the admins' responsibility to make sure that other users can view the sales numbers, but they will probably not have to pay attention to the numbers themselves.
2. Consumers are people whose jobs are closely tied to the sales numbers, but may not be technical enough to produce a chart on their own. While they don't normally make the charts themselves, they are able to easily click around and edit a chart for their specific use case. For example, a consumer who is responsible for business in California is able to filter the chart to show only sales in California.
3. Analysts are those who have a deep understanding of data, including metrics, statistics, and databases. They are close to the business but perhaps not as close as some consumers, who they consider the...

Table of contents

• Metabase Up and Running
• Why subscribe?
• Preface
• Section 1: Installing and Deploying Metabase
• Chapter 1: Overview of Metabase
• Chapter 2: Deploying Metabase with AWS
• Section 2: Setting Up Your Instance and Asking Questions of Your Data
• Chapter 3: Setting Up Metabase
• Chapter 4: Connecting to Databases
• Chapter 5: Building Your Data Model
• Chapter 6: Creating Questions
• Chapter 7: Creating Visualizations
• Chapter 8: Creating Dashboards, Pulses, and Collections
• Chapter 9: Using the SQL Console
• Section 3: Advanced Functionality and Paid Features
• Chapter 10: Advanced Features, Getting Help, and Contributing
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