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You're reading from  Metabase Up and Running

Product typeBook
Published inSep 2020
Reading LevelBeginner
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781800202313
Edition1st Edition
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Author (1)
Tim Abraham
Tim Abraham
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Tim Abraham

Tim Abraham is originally from Oakland, California, and currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has been working in Data Science for 10 years, spending his time working at consumer technology companies like StumbleUpon, Twitter, and Airbnb and advising a few others. He also spent time as a Data Scientist in Residence at Expa, the Startup Studio that Metabase came out of, which is where he got to know the product and the founding team. Find him on Twitter @timabe.
Read more about Tim Abraham

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What is a database?

While a thorough overview of databases is beyond the scope of this book, let's learn (or for some readers, refresh ourselves) about what databases are. According to Wikipedia, "a database is an organized collection of data, generally stored and accessed electronically from a computer system" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database). Databases have been around for decades, and today, there are many different types of databases for different use cases.

Traditionally, the most common type of database has been the relational database. Relational databases are made up of tables, which can be thought of as spreadsheets. Tables are rectangular, meaning they have rows and columns. The relational part comes from how the tables link to one another, as depicted in Figure 4.1. Note how in Figure 4.1, we have an orders table and an users table, linked together by id_user. Rather than store all the user information for each order (such as name...

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Metabase Up and Running
Published in: Sep 2020Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781800202313

Author (1)

author image
Tim Abraham

Tim Abraham is originally from Oakland, California, and currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has been working in Data Science for 10 years, spending his time working at consumer technology companies like StumbleUpon, Twitter, and Airbnb and advising a few others. He also spent time as a Data Scientist in Residence at Expa, the Startup Studio that Metabase came out of, which is where he got to know the product and the founding team. Find him on Twitter @timabe.
Read more about Tim Abraham