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Metabase Up and Running
Metabase Up and Running

Metabase Up and Running: Introduce business intelligence and analytics to your company and make better business decisions

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eBook Sep 2020 332 pages 1st Edition
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Metabase Up and Running

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...

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...

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...

Metabase's origins

Metabase began as an internal tool at Expa (https://www.expa.com), a start-up studio in San Francisco run by Garrett Camp, the co-founder of Uber. His CTO, Sameer Al-Sakran, had been working on simple ways to serve actionable data to CEOs and investors of companies in the Expa portfolio.

These start-ups needed an easy, low-cost, and low-friction way to understand their product data and measure things such as growth and engagement. It didn't take them long to realize that if the tools they were building were helpful for Expa's start-ups, they would probably be helpful to other start-ups, technology companies, and other organizations. They decided to turn this internal project into a company. Soon after, they put the source code for their project on GitHub, a website for collaborative software development that we'll rely on throughout this book. It became available for everyone to use, and Metabase was born.

On October 21, 2015, Metabase...

Why open source?

One of the unique things about Metabase that sets it apart from other analytics software is that it is open source. That means the source code for Metabase is freely available to be downloaded, redistributed, and modified. All the code for Metabase is hosted on the project's GitHub repository at https://github.com/metabase/metabase. So why is open source a big deal and how might it benefit you, the user?

It's free

Analytics software can be pricey. The goal of Metabase is to offer the same (or better) quality for free, so you can get the most value from your data without paying a third party. Metabase's open source software is and always will be 100% free to use. You may be wondering: how does Metabase make money? Recently, they've come out with an Enterprise version and a cloud hosting solution, both of which they charge for. The Enterprise version has some powerful features, some of which might make sense for certain organizations. In this...

Installing Metabase locally

By far the easiest way to try out Metabase is to install it locally. Installing Metabase locally means that you are running the program from your own computer, rather than off some external server (for those unfamiliar with servers, you can think of them as computers that are always running and accessible via the internet). While running Metabase locally is not the ideal way to run Metabase, it was created to be perfect for beginners who just want to kick the tires, try it out, and gain familiarity with the product. I'll go into detail about its limitations later in this chapter, but for now, let's go ahead and install it.

Installing on Mac

To familiarize yourself with Metabase's website, head to https://www.metabase.com. There you'll see a Get Started button. Click that and you'll be taken to a page with all the various installation options, with their Metabase Cloud hosted version highlighted by default. Click the Host it...

Installing and deploying Metabase via the cloud

In the last section, we learned how to install Metabase locally on our computers. We also learned the limitations of running it locally. By installing and deploying to the cloud, we unlock Metabase's true power. Let's get started.

Running software in the cloud

The good news is that it is not too much more complicated to get Metabase running on a web server. Practically, this means that when you run Metabase on a web server and close up your laptop, Metabase will stay up and running (unlike a locally installed version).

While you could go out and buy a web server and plug it in at home, today that is rarely done. Running a server in your home or office is referred to as on-premises, or on-prem. Some organizations may have their own servers on-prem for security reasons but nowadays most servers are run in the cloud. Today you can pay companies including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google a very small amount of money and they...

Summary

At this point, we have learned what Metabase is, what it is used for, and who should use it. We've outlined the four types of Metabase users: admins, consumers, analysts, and power users – the latter of which you will be by the end of this book!

We have installed Metabase locally, and in the cloud, using Heroku. We have an instance of Metabase running and have signed up for an account. We're all but ready to add other users and start analyzing our data.

At the same time, we now understand the limitations of using Heroku's Free Tier to administrate our Metabase instance. As mentioned throughout the chapter, the recommended way to run Metabase is with AWS. Doing so is a much more involved process than the one-click method Heroku offers, but a necessary step for those who want more control and oversight.

In Chapter 2, Hosting Metabase on AWS, we will take a detailed look at running Metabase with AWS.

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Key benefits

  • 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

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.

Who is this book 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.

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

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Table of Contents

14 Chapters
Section 1: Installing and Deploying Metabase Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 1: Overview of Metabase Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 2: Deploying Metabase with AWS Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Section 2: Setting Up Your Instance and Asking Questions of Your Data Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 3: Setting Up Metabase Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 4: Connecting to Databases Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 5: Building Your Data Model Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 6: Creating Questions Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 7: Creating Visualizations Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 8: Creating Dashboards, Pulses, and Collections Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 9: Using the SQL Console Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Section 3: Advanced Functionality and Paid Features Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 10: Advanced Features, Getting Help, and Contributing Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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Ricardo Landim Jan 08, 2021
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I absolutely loved this book. It’s very detailed and very easy for beginners to understand and follow the steps.Great resource for those looking to use Metabase at their company. I feel like no stone was left unturned so someone with access to this book will have everything they need to get Metabase working perfectly, and more.
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Rob Oct 08, 2020
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Well structured and complete. Lets you go from nothing to having your very on fully deployed and fully functional Metabase instance with reports and dashboards that you can easily share with your team.
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MSSF Nov 08, 2020
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Great book about metabase. Author Tim Abraham is a world class expert in his field.
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A. Faiz Dec 31, 2020
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Tim's guide to getting Metabase up and running is incredibly informative and useful for anyone interested in setting up Metabase for their business needs. I've been using Metabase since the beginnings of the product, and I still found nuggets in this book that I wasn't aware of.The organization of the book leads you through the steps in a realistic way of how one would integrate the product and workflows into the existing process of data collection for most scenarios a company would need. Even more importantly, the book walks through some of the helpful ways you can share Metabase insights through other tools like Slack and email to help spread knowledge and insights on your analysis. I learned some new things about how to organize the data and use snippets of query code across questions that I didn't know existed. I've been using Metabase on AWS consistently for years and Tim's steps aligned with my own experience very well. Some of the lessons he shares are incredibly helpful in organizing dashboards and projects in a cohesive way that definitely helps once your data needs reach a certain scale.Hopefully others find this guide helpful and can leverage the power of Metabase for their own companies and products!
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Josh Yiangou Jan 04, 2021
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I've been evaluating different analytics software for my company and this book was the perfect read for learning more about Metabase and deploying it. While the world of databases, deploying analytics tools, and analytics is complex, this book helped simplify it with very helpful step-by-step guides and commentary from the author. Coming from an analyst background, I learned a lot about the processes of managing a database and cloud-based analytics software.In addition to the guides, there are many excellent recommendations on best practices for managing data and your data model within your organization. Metabase also has several interesting differentiators from its larger competitors that can make data more accessible to nontechnical people while providing more security to your data.
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