What is Metabase and what is it used for? Metabase is a business intelligence tool. It helps you to analyze huge amounts of data to make data-driven business decisions. In this post I’ll show you some of the cool parts of Metabase and what it can do for you.
What is Metabase?
Metabase is an ambitious open source business intelligence tool. It is written in Java and can be deployed on various platforms. With Metabase you can connect to various database engines. After that you can slice and dice your data in endless ways.
That means you can create queries to your connected databases. In the Metabase terminology a query is called a question. So you ask a question to your datasets and Metabase will give you an answer. Depending on your question this answer can be a single value, a results table or a graphical representation with lot’s of details.
What means business intelligence?
Perhaps you think now that all sounds cool but what the f… does business intelligence actually mean? Nowadays companies operate with several systems for example for warehouse status, customer relationship management and web analytics.
Now you can logically connect all of these data sources. This allows you to create specific reports which help you to understand your business in a data-driven way. Your business decisions can now be based on real data and no more on your gut feeling. This exactly is the business intelligence part.
Metabase as BI tool
As I mentioned before, in Metabase you ask questions to your connected data sources. Then you configure the way the result should be presented. No matter if you choose a detailed table or a multi-line chart, you can save every question for later reference.
Metabase Dashboards
Metabase questions are the foundation for your data analysis. But you can not only view them separately. You can also add them to nice looking dashboards. This can help you to group certain metrics or to get a quick overview of your main KPIs.
You can also share individual questions or complete dashboards with your team members. Metabase allows you to add multiple users and you can define different groups with specific access controls. So for example your data scientist has full read-access to your data sources.
He will be able to create the Metabase questions and can set up multiple dashboards for specific departments. The users of each department will only get view access to their dashboards. So you can exactly define who can access which part of your company data.
Multiple query builders
To ask your specific question you can choose one of Metabase’ three query builders.
- Simple question
- Custom question
- Native query
Simple question
A simple question shows you the raw data of a specific database table. Here you see an exact view of all columns and rows in that table. Of course this it not that exciting but can help you to find the specific field names before creating a native query.
Custom question
Here it gets a lot more exiting. With a custom question you get access to the graphical query builder of Metabase. In this graphical interface you can build quite complex queries without the need of understanding SQL syntax. This mode can be useful for users without detailed knowledge of your database engines.
Native query
Even the custom question builder is quite powerful yet it has it’s limitations. When it comes to more complex queries like advanced JOIN operations you need to work with the native query builder. Here you can execute every query your database engine understands.
Metabase Advantages
For me the biggest advantage is Metabase is an open source project. This means you get a really powerful software without tremendous costs. Metabase is developed very actively on it’s Github Repo since 2015. So it’s not one of these one-hit wonders which gets abandoned after a short time.
Besides the open source version there is also an enterprise version available. This comes with some additional high-level features like auditing tools and priority support. Of course the enterprise version has a price tag but this also helps funding the open source version which is a good thing.
Metabase Disadvantages
As business intelligence tools are a complex type of software so also Metabase comes with a learning curve. But for many people the biggest disadvantage is the quite advanced deployment of the self-hosted open source version. You can’t simply run it on a standard hosting like WordPress.
Metabase needs a Java runtime environment and in most cases an additional reverse proxy setup is necessary. But even this sounds quite difficult you can check out my Metabase installation tutorial.
Metabase Alternatives
Today there are lot’s of business intelligence tools on the market. On the one hand there are these giant tools from Oracle or IBM to be used by very huge corporations. Then there is a large category of SaaS BI tools like Tableau. They are often used by medium size companies and can also be quite expensive.
The third category are the open source BI tools where Metabase belongs to and I think it’s the most powerful tool in this space. There is also Redash as an open source alternative but in my own tests it needed a lot more server resources, had no graphical query builder and the dashboards looked quite dated.
Conclusion
If you’re a small or medium size company and are looking for an open source BI tool I would definitely recommend you to check out Metabase. It’s actively developed and new features were released every few month. And the best part is it’s available for free.