Summary
Business Intelligence software is often cumbersome and requires specialized knowledge of the tools and data to be able to ask and answer questions about the state of the organization. Metabase is a tool built with the goal of making the act of discovering information and asking questions of an organizations data easy and self-service for non-technical users. In this episode the CEO of Metabase, Sameer Al-Sakran, discusses how and why the project got started, the ways that it can be used to build and share useful reports, some of the useful features planned for future releases, and how to get it set up to start using it in your environment.
Preamble
- Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
- When you’re ready to build your next pipeline you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to run a bullet-proof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute.
- For complete visibility into the health of your pipeline, including deployment tracking, and powerful alerting driven by machine-learning, DataDog has got you covered. With their monitoring, metrics, and log collection agent, including extensive integrations and distributed tracing, you’ll have everything you need to find and fix performance bottlenecks in no time. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datadog today to start your free 14 day trial and get a sweet new T-Shirt.
- Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch.
- Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Sameer Al-Sakran about Metabase, a free and open source tool for self service business intelligence
Interview
- Introduction
- How did you get involved in the area of data management?
- The current goal for most companies is to be “data driven”. How would you define that concept?
- How does Metabase assist in that endeavor?
- What is the ratio of users that take advantage of the GUI query builder as opposed to writing raw SQL?
- What level of complexity is possible with the query builder?
- What have you found to be the typical use cases for Metabase in the context of an organization?
- How do you manage scaling for large or complex queries?
- What was the motivation for using Clojure as the language for implementing Metabase?
- What is involved in adding support for a new data source?
- What are the differentiating features of Metabase that would lead someone to choose it for their organization?
- What have been the most challenging aspects of building and growing Metabase, both from a technical and business perspective?
- What do you have planned for the future of Metabase?
Contact Info
Parting Question
- From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?
Links
The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
Support Data Engineering Podcast
