Metabase 54 just dropped, and it’s a big one. Many of the most impactful improvements are part of the open-source edition, meaning you get them automatically with your Driftwave-hosted instance. If you manage your own self-hosted instance, Metabase provides an upgrade guide here.
Here’s what you can now do (or do better) with Metabase 54:
Better Table Visualizations for Smoother Exploration
Table views just got a lot more usable:
- Text wrapping in cells: No more guessing what that long value says.
- Column alignment options: Format your tables to actually make sense at a glance.
- Row index numbers: Quickly spot where you are in larger tables.
- Smooth performance with big datasets: Especially helpful for tables within dashboards.
- This includes scrollable dashboard tables, no more flipping through pages if you don’t want to (although this might come at a performance cost depending on your dataset).
Smarter Custom Expression Editor
Building logic into your charts just became much more pleasant:
- Multi-line support and auto-formatting: Readable, testable expressions.
- Built-in function browser: Find what you need without digging through docs.
Plus, new functions:
- text(), integer(), date() for type conversions (Postgres users rejoice!)
- splitPart() to parse values like names or URLs
- distinctIf() for conditional distinct counts
- path() to extract the route from URLs
These are big quality-of-life upgrades for analytics engineers.
Flexible Alerts
Get alerts how and when you want them:
- Repeat every N minutes (e.g., every 10 mins)
- Remember to check your cache settings otherwise your end users won’t receive up-to-date alerts!
- Set exact timing for hourly alerts (e.g., at :15 past the hour)
- Monthly alert options
- Cron expressions for power users
What You Don’t Get in the Open Source Edition
Some features from the Metabase 54 release are only available on Metabase Cloud or Enterprise tiers, like:
- Google Sheets exploration
- Note this only applies to Metabase Storage, an add-on which allows you to sync a cloud database within Metabase to your CSVs / Google Sheets.
- Metabase Storage for Cloud-hosted sources
- AWS Marketplace deployment
If those are must-haves, we can help you explore bridging solutions. Metabase also provides a guide to help users explore the pros and cons of self-hosting.
Wrap-Up
Metabase 54 reinforces why we love offering Metabase as a managed open-source solution at Driftwave. Most of the upgrades, especially the ones that improve everyday usability, are already available to our hosted customers.
Ready to try the new features? If you’re already hosted by Driftwave, we’ve got you covered. If not, reach out to see how we can host Metabase for you with all the bells and whistles without locking you in.