Follow progress on feature "Hot swap data sources"

[s_moens]

The Metabase Roadmap states that "Hot swap data sources" ( Replace the table/dataset backing multiple questions in one go) is currently being developed. Since this is a relevant feature for us and will save us a lot of time, I'm wondering where I can follow-up on progress on Github for this feature? Is there a specific branch I can follow? I haven't been able to find this with search functionality.

Thank you!

[flamber]

Hi @s_moens
That is work that being done in the Audit Tools, which are part of the Enterprise/Pro edition.
But I don't think any of this work has been started yet.

[gdoron]

@flamber is this still true?
When can we expect this to land?

[flamber]

@gdoron Yes, but I cannot give you a timeline. I doubt it will make it for v42.

[flix]

Hello @flamber

We are also interested in this feature.
For planing our long term strategy, it would be nice if you could specify a bit what exactly you intend to solve with that feature or what it is suppost to do as the title and description is a bit blurry.

What I would envision is something like this:

Our Environment:
We have some metabase instances all accessing the same SQL Postgres Scheme. Our customers can also create own questions and dashboards. Also on-prem. Therefor we do not have control over all questions/dashboards and can not make adjustments ourself. We roll out a default-collection with a data-model with serialisation to all metabase instances regularly.

Problem:
Since metabase is accessing our SQL database, the SQL database schema became a public API. If we want to rename tables, we might break stuff.

What would help us a little bit:
Have an admin-action available to rename all underlying tables (e.g. with search and replace). If we would have something like this, we could instruct our customers to use it.

What would help us even more:
Define the old table names as part of the data-model. Then metabase could convert all Questions either on startup or on SQL-generation. Since we roll-out the data-model to all instances, this would then happen automatically and without instructing customers to push a button...

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What do you think?

Here is also a related Question:

Rename underlying table

Hi everyone, I would like to to rename the underlying table in database which is conntected do metabase. But is there a way how to do it without destroying Questions? I can imagine that it could as simple as renaming table name in metabase database in table metabase_table, but frontend still expect old table. I don’t change the structure of the table, I just need to change the name. I don’t want to have the view with old name. Thanks for an advice!

Felix

[flamber]

@flix The title/description is vague on purpose, since it's not fully planned out yet. The idea is to have a tool, which can help fixing broken questions (ex. if you have create a question based on table1.columnA, but have changed it in the database to table2.columnZ, then a question would be broken).
But it is complicated. There are many moving things involved to make this work great. It's easy enough to do some search/replace in the application database.

But if you are Pro/Enterprise customer, then I would recommend that you contact support via email, so our Product team can be looped in and more detailed sensitive implementation use-case can be shared by you.