I know this is a bit old, but I’ve seen that metabase tries to execute a question before saving it, sometimes.
What I’m currently doing is going to the database and killing metabase query - as soon as it is killed, the questions saves. That is some pretty odd behavior, and I’m telling metabase to save, not to run the question - on top of that, I can’t expect my users to access Database and kill a query just to be able to save a question. Pretty weird. Is there any bug issue open?