Admin: Knowing which fields users are querying

Hi! I’ve newly been made an admin for my team’s Metabase instance. I just learned about how I can hide tables and columns/fields from the UI. There’s a lot in my database that I’d like to hide, for purposes of general tidiness and navigability. But, I don’t want to inadvertently hide anything that another user on the instance needs to be able to see to run their questions.

Can Metabase present me with a list of, say, tables/columns/fields that are NOT being referenced by any of my other users (in their questions/queries)? Then I could reasonably decide “no one is using this, so by hiding this I won’t break any existing questions.”

Thanks!

Hi @smurray
You would have to dig around in your application database to find the references. Have a look at Metabase Metadata SQL for some examples of general queries.
But it’s likely going to be very difficult, since if someone has created a question that queries a full table, then all columns are included - even if the user might not be looking at or interested in some of the columns.
Think the best thing you can do is to talk with everyone and figure out how you want your data looking from now on.
Hiding columns in Data Model should not break existing questions.

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@flamber Thank you so much. Great answer and great advice. :slight_smile: