Metabase 0.38 Release and What it Means for Our Users

March 18, 2021

Our data platform, Secure Data Kit, integrates with most BI and data visualization tools. We have helped setup integrations with Tableau, Power BI, R, even STATA (that was some work y'all). But there's only one data visualization tool that we natively integrate with and that's Metabase. We love Metabase for a variety of reasons; mostly it has to do with the engaged community of helpers and supporters, but it also has a lot to do with the fact that it's SQL based, a language we know super well. And the tool keeps improving and improving. Which brings us to the 0.38 release of Metabase which, in our opinion, will bring some super amazing benefits to our user base. Below we capture 3 of our favorite features

Dashboard Subscriptions

Probably the most eagerly anticipated feature from metabase (for our team anyways)! This allows users to receive daily notifications for a given dashboard. Formerly you could receive notifications for specific questions but if you have a lot of questions, that's a lot of notifications. Now it's compressed into one nice neat email. You can even have it slacked to you! Hallelujah.

Watch our Loom video on how it works here


Pivot Tables

To all the excel warriors out there, this one is for you. The ability to pivot data in metabase is going to be a powerful feature that our users will love. The beauty of a pivot table is you can easily compress data into summary fashion, then dive into specific sections to explore further.

For example, with the COVID Mapping Project, we've created a pivot that shows each state, how many data points we have for each state, and the daily change in cases. You can then click on the case change to explore that data further for a specific state or date. Metabase is making it easy for us to let our users explore their data.

Watch the Loom video on how it works here

Navigating Collections

This feature is for all the super users out there. The old navigation worked great if you had a relatively flat hierarchy without many nested collections. But if you're like us where you have a tapestry of collections, navigation was kind of a nightmare.

Now in release 0.38, you can see it's more of a tree structure (akin to navigating the file system on your computer). It's much easier to find stuff and move around.

Bonus UX improvement: dashboards are now obvious in that they have a blue icon instead of an icon that blended in with other questions.

If you're interested in metabase hosting or analytics, drop me a line.