We're excited to announce the first release of `redbiom` with default support to query the public facing studies housed in Qiita, which is in excess of 100,000 samples!
As of this release, it is possible to:
* find samples by metadata searches (including restriction clauses like `where ph < 7`)
* find metadata categories of interest
* find features by taxonomy
* fetch sample data
* fetch sample metadata
* summarize samples over a metadata category
...and more. The project is still rough around the edges. Much of the functionality exposed right now are "building blocks" where users need to pipe together commands. We're excited to see how the uses cases evolve, and as they become more clear we will build in explicit commands for desired sets of operations -- an example is `redbiom summarize table`.
We're denoting this release as alpha because we're still exploring the data model, adding in new types of queries, improving clarity on results, and because this tool has not seen wide use yet.