Plug in for performance

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 to run.

Modular drivers and less memory consumption

One of the biggest changes in 0.32 is how database drivers work. Drivers for your database of choice now live in their own directory and don’t get loaded until you actually try and do something like connect to the database or run a query. We’ve seen this change shave around 200 MB off of memory usage in tests(!).

We’re also excited for what this will mean for new database drivers going forward. This system should make it much easier to develop your own 3rd-party database driver to use and share.

Async web server

While we were tinkering, we also moved our API endpoints to be async instead of blocking. In human terms, this means that Metabase should be more performant overall, and less likely to crash if one request goes bad (say, for example, if Kyle on the design team does something silly right before his lunch break).

Support for more langauges

Thanks to the hard work from our contributors, we’ve also added support for five new languages: Russian, Vietnamese, Catalan, Italian, and Ukranian. To see any of these in action, just change your browser’s preferred language after updating Metabase. To help us translate Metabase into your own language of choice, all you have to do is join our PoEditor project.

Additional bits and bobs

We’ve given Metabot some books to read — our bot is nothing if not studious — so now the heuristics it uses to analyze your data when you connect a new database or work with X-rays should be improved. You’ll also see more diverse X-ray filters. And if you’ve previously encountered smart scalars sometimes being… not always so smart about previous values, we’ve added a fix for that as well.

Bug fixes

We’ve also fixed more than 20 bugs as part of this release. Here’s a list of all of them over on GitHub.

Looking forward

To set the stage for 0.33, our old friend the query builder will be getting the spotlight. It’s done a lot in its 3.5 years of service, but we want to make easy questions even easier and enable some brand new things you can do without knowing SQL, so we’ve been working on some updates to it. We’re excited to start getting your feedback on all that, so please stay tuned for more.

Until then, thanks for using Metabase!