Auditing is a Metabase Enterprise Edition feature that gives admins insight into how people are using their Metabase instance. Fig. 1. The team members' audit logs, which lets admins see how people are using Metabase. We’ll use the Sample Dataset included with Metabase to walk...

In a previous article, we covered the basics of sandboxing with Metabase Enterprise Edition. We defined sandboxing as a way to specify what data people can access based on who they are, and showed you how to limit access to table rows. As an example,...

Metabase Enterprise Edition’s data sandboxing feature gives us granular control over what data people can access, from entire databases down to specific columns and rows. “Sandboxing” often refers to creating an isolated environment that’s used to protect or isolate part of a system. Metabase uses...

Collections help keep questions, dashboards, and pulses organized and easy to find. It’s helpful to think of collections as folders where we store our items. We can also set permissions on these collections to hide them from groups who don’t have view access. To learn...

In Metabase, data permissions let us specify which databases and tables groups of people can view and query. In this article, we’ll walk through how admins can configure data permissions by setting up permissions on the Sample Dataset included with Metabase for our Marketing and...

Metabase lets you link filters on dashboards so that the value plugged into one filter limits the options available to the linked filters. Let’s walk through an example using the Sample Dataset included with Metabase. We’ll start with a dashboard on orders data that includes...

Metabase allows you to customize what happens when you click on a question card in a dashboard. This article will walk through how to set up cards to update dashboard filters - what we call cross-filtering. Here’s the dashboard we’re going to wire up: Fig....

Metabase provides some simple building blocks that let you customize what happens when someone clicks on a chart on your dashboard. You can combine these primitives to create crackpots through your reports, with dashboards updating subsequent dashboards, and even sending people to external sites. For...

Metabase 0.37 is here. Head over to our upgrade page if you’re ready, or spin up a new instance to check Metabase out. And if you don’t want to do the upgrading yourself, you can always give Metabase Cloud a look. Interactive dashboards Metabase 0.37...

We are making the Enterprise Edition of Metabase source available. It’s now been a little over a year since we announced a commercial version of Metabase. Over the past year, we’ve learned a lot about how to run an OpenCore business, as well as how...

Metabase tries to keep the default home page simple, as well as give admins the tools they need to customize the home page to suit their needs. Fig. 1. An admin's home page before any changes have been made. Admins can customize the home page...

This article covers how to use Metabase Enterprise’s serialization feature to copy questions, dashboards, collections, settings, and more from one Metabase instance to a new Metabase instance. Metabase serialization The plan Prerequisites Step 1 - Create a dedicated network Step 2 - Spin up two...

Metabase offers a large number of visualization options. For this article, we’ll use the bar chart option to create a histogram, a type of bar chart that displays groups of data across a continuous range. Histograms are helpful for gaining insights into how much of...

Metabase offers a large number of visualization settings. For this article, we’ll be discussing the bar chart option. With bar charts you can compare groups of data with just a glance. One axis specifies the groups, while the other will quantify their count. The goal...

Make searching text a breeze with the filters discussed in this article. At the end, you’ll know how to easily find a word or phrase within SQL questions or simple questions. To skip to a certain section, use these links: Search within a question Update...

With Metabase Enterprise Edition’s white labeling feature, you can customize your user interface: Application name Color palette Logo Favicon Home page Read this article to learn how to personalize your Metabase instance, transforming it from Figure 1 into Figure 2. Figure 1. The clean, classic...

This article gives an overview of the Metabase API. Warning: the Metabase API can change Getting started with the Metabase API Authenticate your requests with a session token Example GET request Example POST request Use developer tools to see how Metabase makes requests A few...

We’re offering Metabase as a service! Ever since we launched Metabase, people have been asking us for a hosted version. We’ve always focused on creating an open source application that is easy to install, maintain, and upgrade for anyone who needs charting or dashboards. But...

This article covers how to visualize data using maps in Metabase. The United States maps used throughout this article were created using the Sample Dataset that comes with every Metabase installation. Map types Make your data compatible with mapping Pin map Region map Grid map...

In this article, we’ll show how you can use Metabase’s Data Browser and other reference tools to learn about your datasets, as well as how administrators can curate information in Metabase about their data. All the examples in this article use the Sample Dataset that’s...

This article covers some best practices for writing SQL queries for data analysts and data scientists. Most of our discussion will concern SQL in general, but we’ll include some notes on features specific to Metabase that make writing SQL a breeze. Correctness, readability, then optimization:...

When it comes to dashboard performance, there are essentially four ways to get your dashboards to load faster: Ask for less data. Cache answers to questions. Organize data to anticipate common questions. Ask efficient questions. Figure 1. An example dashboard with three filter widgets that...

SQL joins are a fact of life when it comes to analyzing data, and with Metabase we try to make getting the answers to your questions as easy possible – even if that requires some more complex tactics. In this article, we’ll cover how to join...

You can use Metabase’s notebook editor to create questions with explorable charts. People can then click on values to pull up an Action menu, which will give them different options to drill through the chart’s data. Figure 1. Questions composed in the notebook editor allow...

This article covers how to create dashboard widgets to filter data in SQL questions. Figure 1 shows the dashboard we’ll be building: Figure 1. What we'll be building: a dashboard with two filters connected to two questions written in SQL. This dashboard features: two questions...

This article shows how to add smart filter widgets to your SQL questions in Metabase using a special type of variable called a Field Filter. Introduction to Field Filters Distinguishing Field Filters from simple Text, Number, and Date Variables Creating a filter widget with a...

This article walks through how to create questions in Metabase using native SQL queries so that viewers of our questions can plug in values and filter the results. While Metabase makes it easy to summarize and visualize data without SQL, data analysts sometimes need to...

Metabase is scalable, battle-hardened software used by tens of thousands of companies to deliver high quality, self-service analytics. It supports high availability via horizontal scaling, and it’s efficient out of the box: a single core machine with 4 gigs of RAM can scale Metabase to...

So, you’re considering embedding Metabase in your application to deliver analytics to your customers. How would that work? In this article, we’ll: Start with the target experience for your customers that you’ll deliver. Give a brief tour of the challenges to providing self-service reporting to...

So you need to provide analytics to your customers. You’d like to put dashboards and charts in your app, make sure nobody can see data that isn’t theirs, and put that in front of your customers or users. These customers may be other businesses like...

SQL Snippets are one of our most anticipated features among our power users. If you’re just tuning in, here’s why: you can now save SQL code as a snippet, and then you or other SQL authors can refer to that snippet in different SQL queries....

Metabase version 0.36 marks another big release from the Metabase team, with help as always from our contributors and the community. If you’re ready to get going, you can start with our upgrade guide, or read on to learn what’s new. New features and improvements...

In mathematics, expressions are collections of symbols that together express a value. If you’ve ever worked with spreadsheet software before, expressions are formulas, like =SUM(A1, B1). Custom expressions in Metabase’s notebook editor are powerful tools that can cover the vast majority of analytics use cases...

Building effective dashboards often involves providing context for folks to give them insight into how or why a calculation exists. While precise titles, descriptions, and labeled axes can go a long way toward clarifying your visualizations, Metabase also allows you to add flexible text boxes...

In version 0.35 we added a bunch of new functions to the custom column, custom filter, and custom aggregation expression formula editors. These let you do string manipulation on columns, construct filters that use ORs, calculate the share of a portion of your data relative...

Hi, everyone. We hope that all of you are staying healthy and safe. We wanted to let you know that we’ve got another big release for you with a bunch of new features and enhancements that should help make it even easier to ask your...

We decided to sneak in a stocking stuffer here towards the end of the year. As always you can read the upgrade guide if you’re ready to get going, but for a bit more on the changes this time around read on below. Showing values...

Since we started offering Metabase in different languages over a year ago, translated by the open source community, we have been blown away by the amount of involvement we have seen. Our translation project on POEditor currently has more than 500 contributors(!), and there are...

Those of you who have been with us for a while have known that a lot has changed in Metabase over the years. We’ve added collections, new dashboard features, embedding, permissions, and a whole lot more. But one specific piece of Metabase, the query builder,...

Since we launched back in 2015, Metabase has been one of the easiest analytics and BI systems to host yourself. We’ve worked hard to make it easy to install, upgrade and maintain. Offering up Metabase as an open source application you host yourself has allowed...

One of our strengths at Metabase has been getting you to a pretty simple chart on your own without having to know (or use) SQL. But simplicity can only take you so far. Every time we’ve added new features to our trusty query builder, it’s...

TL;DR: Metabase raised a Series-A and now has an Enterprise Edition It’s been just over 3 years since we launched in 2015 with another TL;DR of “Open Source Business Intelligence. Installs in 5 minutes, usable by everyone in your company”. Since then, we’ve been starred...

Hello! We’re blogging again so it must be time for a Metabase release. It’s been a while since we’ve seen you all, but that’s because we’ve been down in the basement shoring up some foundational elements of Metabase to make it more reliable and easier...

Metabase 0.31 After our big update to collections in 0.30 we wanted to get back to basics (or at least basics for us) and work on improving some of our visualization landscape. What came out of that was a version of Metabase worthy of bumping...

The translations just keep coming! Metabase is already available in Spanish and Portuguese, and with the release of version 0.30.2 we’re happy to announce that French and Norwegian are available as well! For the French translation, you can join us in thanking users Fabrice Etanchaud,...

Earlier this month we announced that Metabase had been translated into Spanish, and also told you about the new way that people in the Metabase community can contribute to translating the product into other languages. Well, the Metabase community is amazing, and we already have...

We’ve been so excited to see how far Metabase has spread across the globe, and it’s been very clear for a while now that Metabase has lots of users whose preferred language isn’t English. Last year we announced our intentions to make Metabase translatable, and...

When we first hit the “Open Source” button on Metabase nearly two and a half years ago, few of us on the team could have imagined exactly where this project would go. We figured we’d get some traction with small startups or non-profits and try...

For the past couple of months we’ve been working hard on changes to Metabase that will hopefully make your life much easier, but it also means lots about Metabase has changed. Here are some highlights of what’s different, and some important things you should know...

Metabase 0.29 - The Bots of Summer Summer’s peeking its head around the corner, and at least for us here in the Metabase HQ hemisphere, we’re looking out the window wishing we had a few less menial data tasks to do. In pursuit of automating...

TL;DR Embed Metabase dashboards in your application to easily provide analytics to your users and iterate faster. Users expect increasingly sophisticated analytics and reporting as part of any application. Whether you are building a SaaS CRM application, an online video site or a blogging site,...

How’s 2018 been for you so far? Good we hope. It’s certainly been busy here at the proverbial Meta base, and as such we’ve got either an extremely early Valentine’s Day or an extremely late holiday gift for you. What we know for certain is...

Just in time for the holidays, Metabase 0.27 is here with one much-requested feature, an upgrade to X-rays, and more. At Metabase, nothing puts us in a festive mood quite like conditional alerts and automated machine-learning-based time series insights. Alerts! Alerts are here at last....

Metabase 0.26 Just like it’s taboo to wear white after Labor Day, it’s also taboo to have Metabase still be at version 0.25 after Labor Day, so we decided we’d better get on that and release a new version. We also made some really cool...

Since we’ve publicized our contact form, one of the most common requests has been to offer some form of a white labled version of Metabase. We listened and have built a version that we hope lets you combine the power, ease of use and ease...

Overview The Metabase project has a lot of users for whom English is not a first language. There are also a lot more potential users who would be able to use Metabase if it provided an interface in their native language. However, the team has...

The Metabase query builder lets you run simple queries on a single table in your database. Within this fundamental idiom, we’ve added the ability to pull in information from tables linked by Foreign Keys, modify the columns, and create new columns based on mathematical expressions....

It’s summer in the Metabase hemisphere, which means we have a crisp and refreshing new release for you. Perfect for porch sitting, firefly catching, and also data analysis because that’s probably what you actually do with Metabase. You can download the latest version here. If...

If you spend any time reading hacker news, analytics and business intelligence tends to take on very complex overtones. Big Data. Stream Processing. Real Time. Machine Learning to learn your Machine Learning parameters. Meanwhile, everyone else’s engineering blogs are giving you all the details about...

This is a particularly big release, as we’ve shipped a number of features the team has been wanting for years. One of Metabase’s primary goals has been to allow people who understand their data, but not necessarily SQL or even how to formulate questions, to...

Metabase was originally built around collaboration. It came from a need to share common database queries, pass reports around and generally have non-technical members of a team figure out common questions on their own. For the past year or so, we’ve mostly ignored the other...

Data is well understood to be critical to any company’s success. Ironically, many startups tend to shy away from analytics — especially early on. I believe this partially stems from a myth that if you want to have analytics you should carve out around 25%...

Collections We’ve added a new way to organize your questions. You can now create groups of questions called Collections. You can save questions in a given collection, move them around and archive entire collections once you are done with them. Collection Permissions Once you’ve grouped...

Google Analytics Driver We’re big fans of Google Analytics at Metabase and find that a great many people use it for behavior analytics while using Metabase for analysing their the information in their database. We’ve added a (relatively experimental) driver that allows you to pull...

We're leaving this post up for posterity but note that we no longer offer this service. Tl;DR - If you're a developer, DBA or analyst looking for contract work from our users sign up here. Analytics is complicated. Metabase makes asking questions, setting up dashboards...

Last year on October 21st, we released Metabase into the wild. Since then, we’ve shipped 9 major versions, had 38 contributors, 3.5k stars on github, and over 100k downloads. Companies large and small are using us in 110 countries across the world. The team is...

In the beginning, all was peace and love. Then the barbarians showed up at the gate So we built a fence But we still want peace and love inside the fence The Metabase project has had an interesting relationship with permissions and access controls. We’ve...

Data access permissions A way to control access to sensitive data has been one of the most requested features since we launched. With 0.20, we’ve taken the first major step in giving you the ability to lock down an instance. We now allow you to...

“So quick bright things come to confusion.” William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream It’s mid-Summer where we are, and if you’re dealing with analytics on a daily basis, confusion is probably the order of the day. In this release, we’ll give you tools to at...

This article is outdated; Metabase now supports joins! See Metabase joins to learn about joins in simple and custom questions. One of the most common feature requests we get is to “support Joins.” We’ve had a long and semi-sordid relationship with joins in Metabase since...

One feature we’re especially excited to be including in the latest version of Metabase is dashboard-wide filters. If you’ve been using Metabase since the early days, then you are a cool person who probably knows where to find the best sushi and whatnot. But also,...

Summer is here! That means it’s time to break out the sandals, fire up the grill, stock up on sunscreen and upgrade to the latest version of Metabase. In this month’s installment, we bring you lots of features that will make you the star of...

If you’ve been spending time using Metabase and are starting to get itchy about doing some house keeping, we have just the thing. Our newest release gives you tools for organizing the reports and questions, as well as reducing the number of situations you need...

When setting up an analytics system for a company or project, there is often the question of where data should live. There is no one-size-fits-all solution here, as your budget, the amount of data you have, and what performance you want will determine the feasible...

After helping build out a few startup’s analytics stacks, one starts to see some patterns. Sometimes these patterns are happy ones. Just about everyone loves the moment when you go from having no idea what’s going on, to a foggy idea of what happened last...

It’s that time again. In keeping with our commitment to give you new presents once a month, your friendly neighborhood Metabase team is excited to present you with… Fullscreen (and fabulous) dashboards Dashboards have gotten a major overhaul to make them easier to read, better...

While a little exaggerated, anyone who’s been involved with analytics in any capacity will have some story that pretty closely matches the above story. While few people talk about it, Institutional Memory, or more typically Institutional Alzheimer’s, is one of the biggest ongoing problems in...

There’s a lot of hype around microservices, and monolith-bashing seems to be all the rage on HackerNews and Reddit. It’s good to hear DHH bringing some sanity back into the conversation. Large companies often have very good reason to aggressively break up applications into Centi,...

Analytics. Business intelligence. Operational insights. Customer profiling. CRM reporting. At some point all the words blur together and all you’re left with is a kind of rattled hope that if you pay a vendor $Xk/month, they’ll figure out what your CMO wants graphed and leave...

Overview So you want to do event analytics — awesome! This document provides some basic things you should know. There are a few sections to read, as follows: General strategies for implementing event analytics. Describes three high-level options to consider. The anatomy of an event analytics...

Continuing Metabase’s proud quadrennial tradition of releasing a version on Feb 29th, we bring you v0.15! In this release, like in our previous releases, we listened to what you, our community, asked for. Multi-series Charting This is the big one in the batch, with over...

A new version of Metabase is out! See our release notes below. Features / Enhancements Segments - the ability to store and reuse filter definitions Metrics - the ability to store and reuse aggregation definitions Improved support for table namespaces (schemas) in databases that use...

The 2015 Analytics Software Market Now that the books have closed on 2015, it’s time to look back and take in some of the changes in the analytics software market. There have been several trends (open source, cloud hosting, SQL on Hadoop) that have continued...

While through Q2, things seemed very rosey in the public markets for most analytics companies, the overall rumblings in the tech market put a damper on valuations to close out 2015. There are a number of management teams that are no doubt glad the year...

After discussing all the ways that data can help your organization make better decisions in our last blog post, The Push and Pull of Analytics, let’s look at the common mistakes in using data that can make you look silly, lose you the respect of...

Most companies talk a big game about the importance of being data-driven. For companies starting out on their analytics journey, it’s sometimes confusing how this is supposed to work, or how to create a sane plan for rolling out a data-driven culture and the tools...

Hot off the presses, and just in time for the holidays, version 0.13 of Metabase is ready! The reaction to our initial release surprised and delighted us and we want to let you know we’ve been listening to your feedback and requests. The elves have...

TL;DR: Open Source Business Intelligence. Installs in 5 minutes, usable by everyone in your company, download it here. At some point, you get tired of rewriting the same system at every job. You ask around, and it seems like everyone else has written one too....