Asking questions in Metabase

Let's start by understanding what a question is. A question is anything that causes Metabase to execute a database query on your connected data sources and return data. That means that anything that returns data from our database is considered a question, which also means that we've already created a few questions. Recall that in Chapter 5, Building Your Data Model, we spent some time browsing our database tables and applied some filters to them. In the background, Metabase was taking these commands, translating them into SQL queries, executing them, and returning the results. Even those simple actions, since they returned data, would technically be considered questions.

Questions become valuable once they return meaningful data and are saved. Let's illustrate this with a simple example, building upon what we learned in the last chapter.

Saving your first question

To get used to creating and saving questions, let's make a very...