Likelihood to Recommend Ideal for daily standard ETL use cases whether the data is sourced from / transferred to the native connectors (like SQL Server) or FTP. Best if the company uses MS suite of tools. There are better options in the market for chaining tasks where you want a custom flow of executions depending on the outcome of each process or if you want advanced functionality like API connections, etc.
Read full review If your data sets are coming in without much stewardship then
Tableau Prep can help to clean the data before you start trying to create visualizations for your end users. You will save a lot of time this way - rather than seeing problems once you are creating dashboards. If you don't have large data sets or your data is relatively simple, then
Tableau Prep may not be needed.
Read full review Pros Ease of use - can be used with no prior experience in a relatively short amount of time. Flexibility - provides multiple means of accomplishing tasks to be able to support virtually any scenario. Performance - performs well with default configurations but allows the user to choose a multitude of options that can enhance performance. Resilient - supports the configuration of error handling to prevent and identify breakages. Complete suite of configurable tools. Read full review Display the raw data coming in from the data warehouse Point out situations that might be erroneous Show the distribution of raw data figures Read full review Cons SSIS has been a bit neglected by Microsoft and new features are slow in coming. When importing data from flat files and Excel workbooks, changes in the data structure will cause the extracts to fail. Workarounds do exist but are not easily implemented. If your source data structure does not change or rarely changes, this negative is relatively insignificant. While add-on third-party SSIS tools exist, there are only a small number of vendors actively supporting SSIS and license fees for production server use can be significant especially in highly-scaled environments. Read full review Use of Macros within Workflow (and more types of automation) Join Editor also giving a SQL Update Query More types of visuals Read full review Likelihood to Renew Some features should be revised or improved, some tools (using it with Visual Studio) of the toolbox should be less schematic and somewhat more flexible. Using for example, the CSV data import is still very old-fashioned and if the data format changes it requires a bit of manual labor to accept the new data structure
Read full review It is a valuable tool for generating and cleaning files for multiple purposes.
Read full review Usability SQL Server Integration Services is a relatively nice tool but is simply not the ETL for a global, large-scale organization. With developing requirements such as NoSQL data, cloud-based tools, and extraordinarily large databases, SSIS is no longer our tool of choice.
Read full review It works well and is user friendly for the basics but needs more options for bring in data (using SQL queries for example) and export format options.
Read full review Performance Raw performance is great. At times, depending on the machine you are using for development, the IDE can have issues. Deploying projects is very easy and the tool set they give you to monitor jobs out of the box is decent. If you do very much with it you will have to write into your projects performance tracking though.
Read full review Support Rating The support, when necessary, is excellent. But beyond that, it is very rarely necessary because the user community is so large, vibrant and knowledgable, a simple Google query or forum question can answer almost everything you want to know. You can also get prewritten script tasks with a variety of functionality that saves a lot of time.
Read full review I have not really had to reach out for any kind of customer support for
Tableau Prep, so I can't really say. However, the support that
Tableau has given for their other products has been great, so I would assume it would be the same here. They are also constantly adding new features and providing software updates, and that is always a plus.
Read full review Implementation Rating The implementation may be different in each case, it is important to properly analyze all the existing infrastructure to understand the kind of work needed, the type of software used and the compatibility between these, the features that you want to exploit, to understand what is possible and which ones require integration with third-party tools
Read full review Live connections to cloud services (Google Sheets for example) and cloud hosted databases (cloud hosted SIS for example) for scheduled flows are not supported
Read full review Alternatives Considered I had nothing to do with the choice or install. I assume it was made because it's easy to integrate with our SQL Server environment and free. I'm not sure of any other enterprise level solution that would solve this problem, but I would likely have approached it with traditional scripting. Comparably free, but my own familiarity with trad scripts would be my final deciding factor. Perhaps with some further training on SSIS I would have a different answer.
Read full review Before Prep, we had to do all the data joining and connecting in a
Tableau Workbook. Not only did this cause workbooks connected with live data to run frustratingly slowly, a new connection and set-up had to be established every time a new workbook as created, even if you were working with the same data. The extracts produced by Prep allow several workbooks to be working from the same data set-up without any additional work, saving time and stress.
Read full review Return on Investment Data integrity across various products allows unify certain processes inside the organization and save funds by reducing human labour factor. Automated data unification allows us plan our inputs better and reduce over-warehousing by overbuying The employee number, responsible for data management was reduced from 4 to 1 person Read full review Quicker data sets for online reports More efficient data cleaning Ad Hoc reports Costly if using data management to schedule data pull and cleaning (priced per viewer accounts not creator accounts) Read full review ScreenShots