Action menu, drill through, caching

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 navigate their company’s data. While the querying UI has proven to be much more accessible than SQL, it’s still relatively complicated, and requires a fair bit of thought in how to structure one’s questions.

With this version, we’ve provided interactivity for the visualizations you see and allow you to iteratively ask simple, successive questions.

Actions

Actions refer to ways you can change the question you’re currently working with. You’re now able to do things like view the underlying data of charts, re-pivot questions, summarize tables, and more, quickly and easily.

One caveat – actions and drill-through are only for cards built using our GUI. We’ll provide ways to use them on questions that are built in SQL in coming releases.

Drill-through

Drill-through means that any data point in a question result you click on can be explored — whether a bar in a bar chart, a cell in a pivot table, or a username in a list of users. We suggest you get in the habit of clicking on interesting data points and seeing where you can go!

Caching

When you put out a blog with a chart in it, chances are you do so hoping that people will read it. You might even be hoping that a lot of people end up reading your post. If that blog post has a live chart on it, chances are you probably don’t want each of those readers causing your data warehouse to run the same query. With this release, we allow you to cache data warehouse queries, and let more people read your magnum opus. We also provide adaptive caching settings that cache slower-running queries for longer.

Presto Support

Dipping our toes in the Hadoop waters, we now support Presto, one of the main SQL-on-Hadoop options. Hats off to our community member, William Turner, for all the hard work that went into this.

New Dashboard Listing Page

If you’re part of an organization with lots and lots of dashboards, you probably have found the current drop-down for dashboards a bit claustrophobic. We’ve given dashboards their own listing page, which will make it easier to stay organized as you grow.

Miscellaneous Improvements

We also fixed 60 bugs and closed over 37 other issues. See github for details.

Upgrading to the Latest Version

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.