Improved search, custom expressions

Metabase 0.39 brings better search, upgraded custom expressions, and ships with a boatload of other polish and improvements.

Finding questions and dashboards just got a lot easier

The big news for 0.39 is our much-improved search: we’ve added typeahead, fuzzy search, and more.

Searches now take into account items’ titles, as well as their metadata (like their descriptions). You can even search the contents of your SQL queries. That’s right: you can search for things like SELECT escape_pod FROM mothership and find that one question you worked on six months ago. We’ve also made it easier to tell which item is the one you’re looking for: you can now see an item’s description, which collection it’s saved in, what kind of object it is, and whether it’s pinned.

Improved custom expressions

We’ve polished custom expressions to make it easier to ask more sophisticated questions. We’ve also included two new functions: isempty for checking for empty strings, and isnull for checking for null values.

New in Enterprise Edition: customize filter values for each dashboard subscription

In Metabase Enterprise Edition, when setting up a dashboard subscription you can now specify different values for each filter in the dashboard. For example, one subscription could send the contents of the dashboard with results filtered for Vermont, while another subscription would get results for Wisconsin. You only need to create one dashboard to send everyone the data they’re interested in

More improvements throughout

You can now connect to Oracle databases over SSL, use a PEM file to connect to a MySQL database over SSL, and configure heartbeat intervals for database connections over SSH tunnels. We’ve even made it possible to manually cast text and number fields to date types. There’s a whole lot of polish in this release, including performance and security improvements; check out the full list in our release notes:

• Metabase Open Source Edition - 0.39
• Metabase Enterprise Edition - 1.39

Get started with 0.39 right now

Before you upgrade

• Definitely make a backup, as it’ll be harder to downgrade from 0.39. Just like we always suggest you make a backup, we are extra-suggesting that you make a backup this time, as our refactoring of the Metabase type system will make it more difficult to downgrade. And be sure to test core functionality in the new version before proceeding with the upgrade.
• Upgrading to 0.39 might take longer than usual. Just a heads up: due to the improvements to Metabase’s type system, large installations might take a while to upgrade.
• Everyone will get an email when they first log in. 0.39 includes a security feature where we now send an email on the first login from an unknown device. When upgrading, since Metabase won’t know about any devices yet, it’ll send an email to each user on that first login.
• Metabase 0.39 will be the last release to support Internet Explorer 11. Starting with 0.40, we’ll drop support for Internet Explorer. It will probably still work with Metabase, but you might get some unexpected behavior, so you might want to move to a different browser.

Upgrade now

• How to upgrade
• Get Metabase

Not sure how to run Metabase? Check out our guide, How to run Metabase in production to find the approach that’s right for you.

Thanks again to all of our open source contributors for filing issues, fixing bugs, and submitting pull requests. Metabase wouldn’t be where it is today without your contributions.

We hope you enjoy the new release — let us know what you think on the forum!

Cheers,

The Metabase Team