Collections, custom calculated expressions

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 you questions into collections, you can assign permissions to each group. If you’ve struggled to provide controlled access to subsets of SQL questions, this should simplify your life greatly. Learn more

Deprecation Warning We’re doing away with Labels in favor of collections. What’s the difference between them? A question can only live in a single collection, while multiple labels could be applied to a question. This change makes permissions more sensible and clear. While labels will work for a few more versions, we recommend you use collections to group questions together, as we will be removing labels in a future version.

Custom Calculated Expressions

You can now express questions that include mathematical operations in the query builder, as well questions resulting in multiple metrics. Just click on “Custom Expression” in the View menu to enter a formula (similar to how Excel works) and click the “+” icon next to your aggregation to add another metric.

Technical Details These expressions are limited to intra-row math (e.g., subtract column X from column Y) and post-aggregation operations (e.g., divide the sum of field X by the average value of field Y). A consequence of this is that multiple aggregations must have the same filters applied to them, so expressions like sum of all transactions with a status "is closed" divided by the number of total transactions can’t be expressed yet.

Miscellaneous improvements

We also fixed 8 bugs and closed over 20 other issues. See github for details.

You can download the new version of Metabase at metabase.com/start To upgrade, see the instructions for your platform. As always we strongly recommend backing up your application database before upgrading.