Exploration at scale

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 more and maybe being in the office a little less as a result, we slapped a fresh coat of paint on our good friend Metabot and asked it to take care of a few more things for us.

Automated explorations

Setting up Metabase for the first time or exploring a new dataset you just connected is now easier than ever. Once you’ve connected to your dataset, Metabot will peruse it and offer up a series of explorations with zero work on your part. Just click around to see what Metabot found, and if anything strikes your fancy you can save it as a dashboard and share it or further tinker with it to your liking. Metabot still can’t replace your in-house data analyst (although it’s been studying at night recently), but these explorations should help give you overviews of the shape and content of your data and help guide you.

Search field values

If you’re dealing with names, addresses, or any large set of values when filtering questions or dashboards, you can now search for values and get results back as you type. This is a feature we’d wished we’d had for so long (and so have many of you) that versions of filtering pre 0.29 feel almost alien to us here at the Metashop now. We hope this makes finding the right values in filters much faster and less headache-inducing for you, too.

Inline tables in pulses

Tables are now invited to the pulse party, too. When you add a tabular question to your pulse, Metabase will show the first 10 columns and 20 rows inline in your email or Slack post.

Spark SQL support

Metabase now has built in support for Spark SQL. Big thanks to Metabase contributor, Joel Wilsson (@wjoel), for all his hard work on this.

Ready to translate

As of Metabase 0.29 the vast majority of Metabase is now ready to be translated. We want to send a special shoutout to our GitHub friend, Joe Bordes, who helped add tags to strings and really acted as a catalyst for us getting to this point. For all of you who have offered to translate or asked for Metabase in your language, we thank you too for being involved. We’re really looking forward to seeing Metabase in a whole bunch of languages going forward.

Our Spanish translation is almost ready, and we expect to release that soon. Stay tuned!

Additional fixes

Per usual, we also tried to capture some bugs and put them outside. Check out the full list of fixes.

How to get version 0.29

You can always download the latest 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.

We’re already on our way to 0.30, which we’re very excited about. Thanks as always for your continued use of Metabase, and we’ll see you back here for the next one.