For what it's worth, you can do drill-through exploration with Metabase fair well. You can click on the graph and zoom-in, see underlying records, as well as re-pivot the result cell today
We also allow you to group by and filter by "joined" columns across foreign keys. We just never put the word "join" in front of end users. As far as users go, they just know that a transaction has a user and that they can filter by the user's country.
Regarding views vs joins, imo the entire point of doing SQL views (i.e. doing joins or transforms to create wide denormalized tables) is so that end users get a clean, explorable dataset they can understand. If you are dependent on doing 3-way joins in the BI tool then only people that know how to put together 3-way joins will use it.
What we've seen this over and over in companies that use Looker and move to us is that because only analysts or engineers can write LookML, every small modification goes through an engineer or analyst. With Metabase, for the most part, once you spend a bit of time cleaning up the data they see, people just figure things out on their own.
(blatant self promotion from a Metabase team member)
We also allow you to group by and filter by "joined" columns across foreign keys. We just never put the word "join" in front of end users. As far as users go, they just know that a transaction has a user and that they can filter by the user's country.
Regarding views vs joins, imo the entire point of doing SQL views (i.e. doing joins or transforms to create wide denormalized tables) is so that end users get a clean, explorable dataset they can understand. If you are dependent on doing 3-way joins in the BI tool then only people that know how to put together 3-way joins will use it.
What we've seen this over and over in companies that use Looker and move to us is that because only analysts or engineers can write LookML, every small modification goes through an engineer or analyst. With Metabase, for the most part, once you spend a bit of time cleaning up the data they see, people just figure things out on their own.
(blatant self promotion from a Metabase team member)