Sometimes we need to create reports about our sales, customers or finances and we spend a lot of time, coding, plotting the data in a graph, and at the end of the day, we just created a little monster (system) that we will need to do maintenance and fix the bugs for a long time.
If you’ve already been through this, you need to know the Metabase, a free tool that we can plug in it in our database and create easily and quickly reports and show the data in a graph, or in a table and other ways.
It’s not necessary to know no one programming language. The Metabase is easy to install and supports the databases:
- MySQL
- Postgres
- MongoDB
- SQL Server
- Google Analytics
- Google BigQuery
Dashboards
You can build some queries, save them as a graph, put all graphs together in a dashboard, share with your team and in a few clicks you have a real-time dashboard.
Dashboard with graphs and auto refresh
Questions
You can create a simple query like:
SELECT email FROM customer WHERE ssn = {{ ssn_number }};Save as a question, and your team can use this question to pick up the customers' email just by passing the SSN number as a parameter.
variables in a questions
The questions it's helpful because you can add up variables in your query and use them as parameters.
Query builder and Native Query
With this query editors, you don’t need to give write privilege in the production database, your team can execute queries in a database with reading privilege, and you can sleep soundly. ;)
Example of a Query builder
Ideally, you would have a replica of your database.
Pulse
Another feature that I use a lot, it's Pulse, you create a simple query and add up a condition, if the condition becomes true, you can set up to deliver a notification via email or slack.
Conclusion
When I discovered the Metabase, it blew up my mind, this tool it's very powerful and easy to manage, no require a previous knowledge and for sure, this tool will save much of your time.