We're back with another big update to Metabase. Here's what's new.

Dashboards just got a lot easier to build

We've outfitted the dashboard editing mode with two major upgrades:

A new and improved way to add questions to your dashboards

Up until now, you've only been able to add questions to a dashboard one at a time. But now you can open up the sidebar to easily search for and add as many questions as you want. It's more satisfying than popping bubble wrap.

Vastly improved reordering and resizing

When you move or resize a card, other cards float away to make room for the new card placement.

A more intuitive way to start new questions from SQL results

One cool feature in Metabase is the ability to use the results of a saved question as the starting point for a new one. In particular, you can use SQL to wrangle some particularly unwieldy tables, save the query as a question, then let other people explore the results using the graphical query builder.

With saved SQL questions, you'll now see a handy Explore results button that fires up the graphical query builder, with the SQL results loaded up as the starting data for your new question.

Improved data selection

We've overhauled the search bar in the data picker for your new questions so that it now searches through all of your tables and saved questions instead of simply filtering the list.

New in Metabase Enterprise Edition

Here are some new tricks we've added to the Enterprise edition to help you tame large Metabases.

We've made it easy to find queries to optimize in the Audit tab

View query runs, average execution time, and total time running to help you track down and focus your optimization efforts on heavily-used queries.

Better serialization

You can download your application metadata to take snapshots of your Metabase, or preload new Metabase instances with questions and dashboard. Serialization now captures customizations, like custom click behavior on dashboard cards, so your dashboards will be all wired-up and ready to go when you load them. Check out this article on serialization to learn more about what serialization can do, and how.

Even more polish and enhancements

We've made a whole host of additional improvements to Metabase.

• Manage more people, faster: we've added search and pagination to the People tab in the Admin panel.
• Paginated search results (so you get results faster).
• Stronger password requirements (no more password123).
• Better human-friendly field names.
• URLs now show friendly names for databases, questions, dashboards, and collections. No links will break; we're just tagging on titles to the URL (e.g., "/question/123" becomes "/question/123-Orders-by-product")
• Better filter names.
• Metabase can now infer data types for custom columns, so it knows to show you the right filter options for that column.
• Date string formatting coercion.
• Links to docs to help you connect databases.
• Friendly custom expression error messages to help you debug faulty formulas.
• Better visibility into database connection pooling.
• Link settings for visualizations on columns (set up a link setting for a question once, so you don't have to redo it every time you add the question to a dashboard).

Here is the full list of enhancements and bug fixes:

Enhancements

• Fix funnel appearance (#16626)
• Confusing UI when adding GeoJSON with no identifiers (#16613)
• Can't move item to "Our analytics" using drag-n-drop (#16498)
• Collections Metadata FE Implementation (#16356)
• Cannot filter only on longitude/latitude range - UX is forcing user to fill out values for both fields (#16291)
• Display link to database integration docs when connecting a new database (#16018)
• Infer the data type for Expression Dimension (custom column) (#15952)
• fix funnel dashboard card overflow (#15869)
• make TableInteractive cell more button-like (#15833)

Bug fixes

• Error message missing when logging in to a disabled account with Google sign-in (#16701)
• unix-timestamp->honeysql implementation for h2 is incorrect for microseconds (#16628)
• Better error handling when adding malformed GeoJSON (#16611)
• Can't archive a question from the Question page (#16512)
• Can't "Select All" collection items if all items are pinned (#16497)
• Bulk archive doesn't work (#16496)
• Selecting bin count on intermediate data question fails (#16379)
• Group by on a :Coercion/YYYYMMDDHHMMSSBytes->Temporal postgres column fails (#16335)
• Double binning menu for date fields when using Saved Question (Native) (#16327)
• Bug in values on data points for waterfall charts (#16246)
• Table view on Permissions shows error on browser refresh (#16237)
• Password login on SSO instance drops the redirect URL (#16216)
• No error is reported when adding SQLite database that doesn't exist (#16199)
• Specific combination of filters can cause frontend reload or blank screen (#16198)
• Dashboard Contains filter doesn't remain when clicking on Question title (#16181)
• Normal login errors are not surfaced if SSO is also active (#16122)
• Search endpoint breaks if single model asked for in postgres before 10 (#16059)
• Version info and hash missing in 'About Metabase' in master (#16045)
• Google sign-in client ID setting regularly fails to save (#15974)
• Surface password change error messages to users (#15954)
• Incorrect selection range leading to aggressive popover (#15851)

Upgrading

You can download a .jar of the release, or get the latest on Docker. Make sure to back up your Metabase
database before you upgrade! Need help? Check out our
upgrading instructions.

Docker image: metabase/metabase:v0.40.0
Download the JAR here: https://downloads.metabase.com/v0.40.0/metabase.jar

Notes

SHA-256 checksum for the 0.40.0 JAR:

2710b8946d4ddd384221eee114db89efb64d53f57cf17bb23fd9aea0f03c6a8c