What is Metabase?
Metabase is an open source tool that allows for powerful data instrumentation, visualization, and querying. An open source tool means that developers, engineers, and data scientists are able to modify and share Metabase capabilities to their own needs, and eventually, the needs of their organization.
Metabase lets you ask questions (or query) about your data without having to write any code or know SQL, although those who are familiar with SQL can customize their Metabase builds further.
How is Metabase designed?
Metabase is designed so anyone can get answers to their questions themselves — but it's also easy to build, schedule, and share dashboards with your whole company. For some, it was the beginning of democratizing data discovery.
Metabase can be used for a number of reasons and is especially valuable to those outside of the data organization. An example of a Metabase dashboard would be if an eCommerce sales team wanted to understand who was buying what, and when. They could use data and visualizations to understand the relationship between these factors based on historical data collected.
What features does Metabase have?
- Pulse reporting. This is a key resource for analytics and sharing data knowledge without gate keeping these insights with data stewards (i.e. people within the data organization). Because of the customizable nature of Metabase, pulse reporting can be changed based on what KPI's need to be tracked.
- Analysis of Data in a warehouse. Metabase can pull insights directly from your data warehouse dependent on how you've set it up. And, because of the powerful data visualization capabilities of Metabase, this analysis is easy to understand and share.
- Ease of installation and customization. Its open-source nature and ability to integrate with almost every database and data warehouse is truly one of Metabase's most important features.
What is Metabase used for?
Metabase is loved by hundreds of companies around the world for many different use cases. Common Metabase use cases include:
Analytics - Track key business metrics like conversion rates, user growth, churn rates and more.
Business Intelligence - Stay on top of your business with financial information at your fingertips.
Data exploration - Explore your data in a way that makes sense to you with just a few clicks.
Reporting - Automatically send reports to yourself or your team or link them to your internal dashboards.
There are 3 ways to do this:
