Partner and community drivers

In addition to our Officially supported drivers, many people build and maintain drivers for database integrations.

We have two types of third-party drivers:

• Partner drivers
• Community drivers

How to use a third-party driver

Self-hosted

To use a Partner or Community driver on a self-hosted Metabase:

1. Download the latest jar file from the driver’s repository (see the repo’s Releases section for the JAR files).
2. Copy the JAR file into the plugins directory in your Metabase directory (the directory where you run the Metabase JAR).

You can change the location of the plugins directory by setting the environment variable MB_PLUGINS_DIR.

Metabase Cloud

Partner drivers, like officially supported drivers, are available out-of-the-box on Metabase cloud. No action needed.

Community drivers are not supported on Metabase Cloud.

Partner drivers

Partner drivers are available both on Metabase Cloud and on self-hosted Metabases.

To qualify as a partner driver, the driver must:

• Have a sponsor (usually the database’s vendor) who has committed to maintaining the driver for future releases.
• Pass the Metabase test suite and a code review by our team.
• Have a permissive license.

Current partner drivers:

• Firebolt
• Starburst (compatible with Trino)

Partner drivers are available to Cloud customers out-of-the-box.

If you have interest in becoming a partner, please fill the partner form and we will get in touch.

Community drivers

Note: Metabase Cloud doesn’t support community drivers

Anyone can build a community driver. These are the currently known third-party database drivers for Metabase.

You install these drivers at your own risk. The plugins will run as part of your Metabase instance and, as such, will have access to anything it does.

Database	GitHub Stars	Last release (if available)
Amazon Athena
ClickHouse
CSV
Cube.js
Datomic
DB2
Exasol
Firebird
Impala
Materialize
Neo4j
Spark Databricks
Teradata

If you don’t see a driver for your database, then try looking in the comments of the issue related to the database. You might also find more by searching on GitHub.

If you are having problems installing or using a community driver, your best bet is to contact the author of the driver.

Metabase Cloud doesn’t support community drivers, meaning that (for now) you can only use Metabase Cloud with the officially supported drivers, and the partner drivers listed above.

Write your own driver

Check out Guide to writing a Metabase driver.