Amazon Redshift

To add a database connection, click on the gear icon in the top right, and navigate to Admin settings > Databases > Add a database.

Connection and sync

After connecting to a database, you’ll see the “Connection and sync” section that displays the current connection status and options to manage your database connection.

Here you can sync the database schema and rescan field values, and edit connection details.

Edit connection details

To access or modify your database connection settings, click the Edit connection details button.

Display name

The display name for the database in the Metabase interface.

Host

Your database’s IP address, or its domain name (e.g., esc.mydatabase.com).

Port

The database port. E.g., 3306.

Database name

The name of the database you want to connect to.

Schemas

Here you can specify which schemas you want to sync and scan. Options are:

• All
• Only these…
• All except…

For the Only these and All except options, you can input a comma-separated list of values to tell Metabase which schemas you want to include (or exclude). For example:

foo,bar,baz

You can use the * wildcard to match multiple schemas.

Let’s say you have three schemas: foo, bar, and baz.

• If you have Only these… set, and enter the string b*, you’ll sync with bar and baz.
• If you have All except… set, and enter the string b*, you’ll just sync foo.

Note that only the * wildcard is supported; you can’t use other special characters or regexes.

Username

In order for sync and scan to work, make sure this database user account has access to the information_schema.

The database username for the account that you want to use to connect to your database. You can set up multiple connections to the same database using different user accounts to connect to the same database, each with different sets of privileges.

Password

The password for the username that you use to connect to the database.

Use an SSH tunnel

See our guide to SSH tunneling.

Additional JDBC connection string options

You can append options to the connection string that Metabase uses to connect to your database.

Re-run queries for simple explorations

Turn this option OFF if people want to click Run (the play button) before applying any Summarize or filter selections.

By default, Metabase will execute a query as soon as you choose an grouping option from the Summarize menu or a filter condition from the drill-through menu. If your database is slow, you may want to disable re-running to avoid loading data on each click.

Choose when syncs and scans happen

See syncs and scans.

Periodically refingerprint tables

Periodic refingerprinting will increase the load on your database.

Turn this option ON to scan a sample of values every time Metabase runs a sync.

A fingerprinting query examines the first 10,000 rows from each column and uses that data to guesstimate how many unique values each column has, what the minimum and maximum values are for numeric and timestamp columns, and so on. If you leave this option OFF, Metabase will only fingerprint your columns once during setup.

Model features

Choose whether to enable features related to Metabase models. These will often require a write connection.

Model persistence

You can enable model persistence to allow Metabase to create tables with model data and refresh them on a schedule. This requires write permissions to a designated schema.

Check out Model persistence.

Danger zone

See Danger zone.

Further reading

• Managing databases
• Metadata editing
• Models
• Setting data access permissions