Report on a dataset

You want the answer to a question about some data as a dashboard you can send, not a table in chat. The agent loads the data into a Postgres, charts it in Metabase (open source BI) and gives you a link. Here: where the world's electricity comes from, from Our World in Data. First, connect your agent.

Ask

Start Metabase on briq, load 'Our World in Data' energy dataset into it, generate a report on world energy generation, and share it with me.

What the agent does

1. Start the stack. One recipe, two briqs: a Postgres warehouse, and Metabase already set up with the warehouse connected, read-only. expose: "private" gives Metabase a URL only whoever has it can open.

briq_run({ recipe: "metabase", stack: "reports", expose: "private" })
→ postgres running · metabase running · url: https://metabase--reports--acme.briq.run/?briq_token=…

2. Load the data. Through briq_exec in the postgres briq, which downloads the file itself, so the data never goes through the agent. One row per country and year, and some 130 measures: electricity by source in TWh (fossil_electricity, nuclear_electricity, renewables_electricity, solar_electricity…), their shares in %, energy use. The table's columns come from the file's header: country and iso_code are text, year an integer, the rest numbers.

wget -qO /tmp/energy.csv https://raw.githubusercontent.com/owid/energy-data/master/owid-energy-data.csv
cols=$(head -1 /tmp/energy.csv | sed 's/,/ numeric, /g; s/$/ numeric/; s/^country numeric/country text/;
  s/year numeric/year int/; s/iso_code numeric/iso_code text/')
psql -U postgres -d warehouse -c "CREATE TABLE energy ($cols)" -c "\copy energy from /tmp/energy.csv with (format csv, header)"

Rows without an iso_code are aggregates (World, continents, income groups, the same regions as each source draws them): country = 'World' gives the totals (its iso_code is empty, not OWID_WRL), iso_code IS NOT NULL keeps the countries. World figures run to 2025.

3. Build the dashboard. Through briq_exec in the metabase briq, where mb calls Metabase's API. A chart is a SQL query and a display (table, row, line, scalar…); the dashboard places it:

mb POST /api/card '{"name": "Largest producers, 2025 (TWh)", "display": "row",
  "visualization_settings": {"stackable.stack_type": "stacked"}, "dataset_query": {"type": "native", "database": 1,
  "native": {"query": "select country, fossil_electricity as fossil, nuclear_electricity as nuclear,
  renewables_electricity as renewables from energy where iso_code is not null and year = 2025
  order by electricity_generation desc nulls last limit 12"}}}'
mb POST /api/dashboard '{"name": "Where the world'\''s electricity comes from"}'
mb PUT /api/dashboard/1 '{"dashcards": [{"id": -1, "card_id": 1, "row": 0, "col": 0, "size_x": 12, "size_y": 8}]}'

One card per question: the world by source since 1985, solar and wind against hydro, the low-carbon share of the largest producers, renewables' share country by country.

4. Share it. A public link shows that one dashboard, read-only, without an account:

mb POST /api/dashboard/1/public_link
→ {"uuid":"26caf580-…"}

The link to send is the briq's private URL with the dashboard's path: https://metabase--reports--acme.briq.run/public/dashboard/26caf580-…?briq_token=…. briq turns away every request without the token before it reaches Metabase, so only people with the link see the report.

Tips

• First boot takes about three minutes while Metabase migrates its database.
• Polish it by hand at URL, signed in with METABASE_ADMIN_EMAIL and METABASE_ADMIN_PASSWORD.
• Fresh data, same dashboard: Our World in Data updates the file as Ember and the Energy Institute publish; load it again and every chart, a query run on each view, follows.
• Withdraw the link with briq_expose({ briq, port: 3000, rotate: true }): the URL stays, the old token stops working. Destroy both briqs when the report has served its purpose.