Chapter 1: Overview of Metabase

Metabase is a free and open source analytics software that allows you and everyone in your organization to ask questions of your data, create visualizations and dashboards, send out daily reporting, and much more.

Traditionally, organizations with good analytics either had to pay for expensive enterprise software, employ a cadre of data scientists and data engineers, or both. The value of analytics was high but the barrier to entry was even higher. Today, the value of analytics continues to grow, but the introduction of software such as Metabase has lowered the barrier to entry. This book will teach you, regardless of your background in analytics and engineering, how to create a robust and scalable analytics environment for your organization using Metabase.

This chapter will be a gentle introduction to Metabase, where we'll learn what it is and how to install it. We will then learn about more powerful, cloud-based installation methods that allow for collaboration. By the end of the chapter, you will learn how to deploy your own instance of Metabase to the cloud.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:

• Introducing Metabase
• Metabase's origins
• Why open source?
• Installing Metabase locally
• Installing and deploying Metabase via the cloud