Earlier quoted context omitted.
Second this recommendation. Very easy to get up and running - may not be able to handle some complex use cases, but for the basics it's fantastic.
It must have come very far in the past few months then...based on my experimentation, it was far from being ready for production use if you needed anything beyond the most basic of SQL queries. That said, I'm rooting for it (and now, caravel). We use Pentaho, and it's....meh. A lot of moving parts, a big learning curve, and a user experience that's just ok. I'm hoping Metabase (and now Caravel) will both succeed...th…
If you don't mind, I'd love to hear why you felt we were far from being ready for production.
Our main challenge has trading off ease of installation and use with the inevitable feature creep that causes the lots of moving parts and learning curve you find meh about Pentaho. You're right in that we've focused on making the most basic of sql queries (via our non-sql tool) usable by anyone in the company on their own vs essentially producing an analytics SDK like Pentaho/Jaspersoft.
On the language front, we made a conscious decision to optimize for ease of installation and low maintenance overhead. While I agree, it's made contributing less accessible, it's been amazing how porting has made Metabase more stable and easier to install. We run a bunch of instances for people, and our ops footprint has been silly small.