Sandboxing with saved question performance issues

Inside of Metabase I have a pretty simple save question, which just counts the rows in a table. Call this Count of row in table A". The query obviously finishes executing very quickly.

However, if I choose to sandbox table A, then the query becomes very slow. I'm talking 20 - 30 seconds.

My sandboxing is using a saved question and the save question looks like:

Table A

Join data
Table A (left join) Table B on TableA.table_b_id = TableB.id

Join data
Table B (left join) Table C on TableB.table_c_id = TableC.id

Join data
Table C (left join) Table D on TableC.table_d_id = TableD.id

So a very simple joining structure with 3 joins. My sandboxing then uses a variable on a column inside of Table D to actually perform the sandboxing.

I'm not sure if it's important, but tables B and C and D are also all individually sandboxed themselves in the same manner. For example, Table B is sandboxed like

Table B

Join data
Table B (left join) Table C on TableB.table_c_id = TableC.id

Join data
Table C (left join) Table D on TableC.table_d_id = TableD.id

with again the actual sandboxing variable being a column in Table D.

Does anyone know why this sanboxing structure would be very slow for such a simple query like counting all rows?

Addition context:

  • I am not selecting any columns from any joined tables
  • I am using the hosted version of Metabase

If you’re using sandboxing please write to help at Metabase dot com as you have premium support. My guess here is that the database is using a non optimized query because you’re using a dimensional model

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