After releasing the Exasol JDBC Tableau connector 0.4.0 (adding Kerberos authentication support) the integration team was looking for new tasks, so product management asked us to look into Metabase. Challenge accepted!
Metabase is a business intelligence tool that allows you to explore, query and visualize data in your database. Of course we wanted to add support for our Exasol database.
Metabase already ships with support for many databases, but there is also a long list of open source third party community drivers. Metabase itself (and therefore the drivers) are written in the Lisp-like language Clojure. After getting a Clojure crash course by reading the book “Clojure for the Brave and True” by Daniel Higginbotham and replenishing our supply of parenthesis we started with the work.
Thanks to the documentation and many existing open source examples we soon created the first connection to an Exasol database:
You can also view the schema:
Explore your data:
… and even visualize it:
… everything without configuring anything besides the database connection!
It turned out that Clojure is an excellent choice for extending Metabase: It’s easy to create a driver with default behavior and customize it step by step for the database:
Want to try it out for yourself?
- Install Metabase and set it up if you don’t have it running already.
- Go to the Exasol Metabase Driver repository and download version 0.1.0.
- Follow the user guide to install the driver and connect to your Exasol database.
Please keep in mind that this is the initial release that may have some issues. If something is not working as you expected, please create a GitHub issue.