I’d like to set up Metabase as a query builder and reporting tool for a Redshift data warehouse, which has a couple thousand tables and many tables with millions of rows. Two years ago I tried it and the automated scanning function took so long it was unusable - I couldn’t even get a list of the tables in the database to show up. Now, in the latest version, it looks like I have the ability to trigger the scans of tables and fields manually. So I did that, and waited 24 hours. I still can’t get the basic query building functions to work properly on any of our databases (they work fine on the sample data). Can someone tell me what am I doing wrong? Is it still just taking too long to scan everything?
For instance, when I first create a question, or click on a specific table and get the querying interface, I immediately get ’ There was a problem with your question
Most of the time this is caused by an invalid selection or bad input value. Double check your inputs and retry your query.’ Not great. If I click “filters” I get a blank “Filter by” list. If i click “summarize” and choose “count of rows” I get a row count. Okay. If i go to the editor and click columns i get a disabled “select all” option that is checked, and nothing else. In the Filter section there’s a button that says “Add filters to narrow your answer” and it does nothing when I click on it.
At the very least, if this is just a matter of waiting a long time for the initial scan, I could use some feedback in the UI telling me when the scan is complete and the tables are ready to query. As it is I have no idea if it’s configuration error on my part. Another helpful feature would be to be able to specify which tables are scanned - there are tons of tables in our data warehouse that are hardly queried.