Tableau Server

Some additional details on the Tableau project I worked on at Southern California Edison (SCE):
During implementation, I was heavily involved with the Tableau consultants, stakeholders, and project managers to make sure that all requirements were met. I did testing myself and signed off on testing that others did. I provided my manager with constant feedback on our progress. We were able to get Tableau installed in one month based on a very aggressive deadline set by management. During this phase, I spent countless hours side by side with Tableau consultants to describe the performance issues we were facing at the time. Here are two of the main hurdles we faced during implementation: One of the main issues we faced was the use of Custom SQL to build our visualizations. Because the roles within my team were highly segmented, we preferred using Custom SQL vs. connecting live to the data. The reason for this is because I was tasked with building the visual. I was not tasked with building the query. The DBA I worked with would hand me the query and I would build the visual from there (creating the necessary calculated fields and formatting the data). Tableau advises its clients against the use of Custom SQL for performance reasons. In addition to performance, there are other drawbacks. We would notice that certain functions in the SQL statements themselves would not get translated correctly into Tableau’s Native SQL (there are workarounds for this). This issue was starkly apparent when connecting to Teradata. Towards the end of my role at SCE, I was working daily on improving the connection to Teradata. Before I left, I was able to take certain reports built in Business Objects and build them in Tableau (but this was only accomplished when connecting live to the data). Another issue was refreshing certain dashboards that were meant to run 24/7. Tableau has the capability to refresh the data behind the visual as frequently as every 5 minutes (I believe). But that refresh does not update the visual. In order for the refreshed query to update the visual, you are required to force the browser to update on an interval of your choosing. It is only with this combination that you can come close to seeing what is happening in real time. The workaround for this issue was to create an .html file that had the URL of the dashboard, which was published to Tableau server embedded in it. From here, you simply double click on the .html file and you would have your dashboard updating both the data (handled by Tableau Server) and the visual (handled by the browser).
Here is a list of the data sources that I would connect to when building visualizations:
1. MS SQL Server
2. Oracle
3. MS Excel
4. Teradata
5. MS Access
Data Blending – There were several instances where business requirements made it necessary to join data from two separate data sources (i.e. - MS SQL Server and Oracle or MS SQL Server and MS Excel). Tableau has an intuitive capability to recognize a data blend. This will be indicated by the use of the link icon next to the primary data source (it looks like an infinity sign). The ability to blend data together was very appealing in the conceptual sense. But there are limitations on the number of rows that you can blend together (I noticed a significant deterioration in performance after 100k rows). This seemed to always be our problem at the SmartConnect Operations Center. We would relentlessly push Tableau’s performance only to find out that our local machine didn’t have the RAM necessary to do what we wanted, or that Tableau was not intended for that specific application. Regardless, I learned a tremendous amount about how the application behaves in different scenarios.
Incremental Refresh – Sometimes it can be useful to use a Tableau generated extract. This is essentially a mini-Tableau database. My manager tasked me with building a report that would store historical data. The purpose of this report was to keep a running total of certain events in the network. The benefit of this report would be that it would automate a manual process that the end users were responsible for on a daily basis. Prior to the implementation of this new report, the end users were tracking the historical data using MS Excel. The challenge I faced was to find a way to store data from the daily query results. Because the original data source did not store historical data, it was necessary for me to take advantage of the “Incremental refresh” option available in Tableau. I do not advocate this method if the daily query results are on the scale of several hundred records or greater. This solution was feasible because the number of records were less than 100 per day. In addition, I worked with the end users and their team lead to create a backup method to get to the final row count in the instance that the Incremental Refresh option failed.
Experience with Teradata – SCE’s 5 million meter network produces around 15 million records per day in just one its tables. The data warehouse team built a set of views that could be accessed within the Teradata schema. After several attempts to connect to Teradata (unsuccessfully) using Custom SQL, I worked with both Tableau’s technical staff and SCE’s DW team to diagnose the problem. We spent multiple WebEx sessions documenting application behavior under various scenarios. Initially, my thoughts were that the problem was that the client application was trying to connect to a View versus a hard coded table. But Tableau assured me that the client application has no problem connecting to views. In this instance, the workaround was to connect live to the data. This worked on certain tables (with several joins in place) but not all. Finally, I was able to re-build a few reports taken from Business Objects. In order to do this, I extracted the SQL from the BO reports and then connected live to the same tables. The result was a visual that came very close to what was found in BO. The report reflected data that was aggregated in the form of a percentage. The percentage represented the performance of a particular district over a time interval (i.e. – 98.99% over a 3 day period).
Integration with ArcMap – The SmartConnect Operations Center’s business requirements made it necessary for me to find ways to enhance the mapping capability within Tableau. The default background map that is offered by Tableau falls short in the areas of zooming and satellite imagery rendering. Therefore, Tableau offers its users the ability to connect to a geospatial (WMS) server. To Tableau’s credit, the steps and information needed to connect to a WMS server are very simple. If you have the URL of the WMS, then you can connect to the server. In my experience, the biggest problem with using the layers from various WMS servers is in the rendering of the image. If your application requires a certain level of detail and/or the ability to zoom in to a certain extent, you may find that the static image stops rendering at a certain zoom level. In the SOC’s application, it was necessary to validate the latitude and longitude of meters in the field and their proximity to other meters (aka – the “mesh” network in wireless meter terminology) by visual inspection. When I left the SOC, I was in high-level discussions between Tableau’s technical team and SCE’s GIS team regarding the rendering of the different layers available through SCE’s internal WMS servers.

I can only speak for myself. Even though it has its shortcomings, Tableau is headed in the right direction by making large amounts of data available to the traditional business user. I dont think its simple to learn Tableau; but its not extremely difficult either. With some training and help from Tableau support, you can improve your ability to provide analysis to your team or department.

We got it working which was the main goal, but we had to create a workaround for a key dashboard that would run 24/7. In order for the view to refresh every X minutes with the updated data, we created a .html file that instructed to the browser to refresh itself every X minutes. This was a pretty simple workaround but it was something we were hoping to avoid.

In our case, they hired a private third party consultant to train our dept. It was extremely boring and felt like it dragged on. Everything I learned was self taught so I was not really paying attention. But I do think that you can easily spend a week on the tool and go over every nook and cranny. We only had the consultant in for a day or two.

The sales consultants do an amazing job of introducing the tool and its capabilities. They are also helpful in explaining the layout of the desktop client and its different functionality.

Keep in mind that they use a sample data source (MS Excel) with a very small amount of data to show off what it can do. What you have to remember is that you are buying the tool so that you can connect to large amounts of data (and possibly blend data together from different databases).

I think the folks that work in support are generally pretty good at what they do (when you get them on a WebEx). But the process of reporting issues to them and waiting for a response (via email only) is a hassle. I never understood why you can't just call them up and discuss the issues with them. It would take a handful of email exchanges before they would agree to a WebEx session. That was frustrating.

When it works, it works great. The drag and drop functionality is seamless. Creating calculated fields is also simple.

Tableau Server is very stable. But Tableau desktop has crashed (or become unresponsive) on a few instances.

Again, assuming that you are working with 100k rows of data or less, it works great. When you increase the number of rows of data by a magnitude of 5 or 10+, there is a significant deterioration in performance.

Tableau has a lot of great features and is simple to use.

Tableau is a great tool to consider if you want full-blown reporting without the headaches of a nightmarish BI Suite implementation. The cost can be restrictive if you have a large number of users, but in most cases it is worth it to get key data out to your customers quickly.

Quick implementation with no real issues.

We had Tableau in person a few times, they were great, but felt the training could have been a bit more structured.

Lots of free videos online.

We always had Tableau representatives willing to offer support as well as in-house demos on new functionality, tips & tricks, etc.

Tableau is very easy to use for both novice/non-technical users up to the most skilled developer. Tableau constantly makes improvements to the menus and "Show Me" features to allow users to get the most out of the product in the least amount of time.

Our instance of Tableau Server was hosted on premises (I believe all instances are) so if there were any outages it was normally due to scheduled maintenance on our end. If the Tableau server ever went down, a quick restart solved most issues.

Tableau gives you the ability to import hundreds of thousands of rows (and more) rather than working directly from the file live - this feature vastly improves speed and increases functionality.

Very easy, sales and service always do a great job.

The annual customer conference is well worth the cost.

Our server implementation could have been better. Even though recommended, the IT department opted out of the 5-day server deep dive training.

Our in-person training was excellent. It was delivered by partner Interworks.

Best in class.

Good as it gets!

I believe the product architecture can perform to expectations. However due to our internal setup, we may not be realizing what we should had planning in IT been supported as needed.

Tableau allows disparate parts of the organization to download their own data from other applications and import it into Tableau for department-specific analysis. For example, the web analytics team uploads data from Omniture, and the Budget/Finance teams upload various data sets from Excel spreadsheets to gain specific insights. Being able to marry all of these with data direct from our data warehouse in one online interface is tremendously helpful.

Implementation was over the phone with the vendor, and did not go particularly well. Again, think this was our fault as our integration and IT oversight was poor, and we made errors. Would they have happened had a vendor been onsite? Not sure, probably not, but we probably wouldn't have paid for that either.

Several team members took in-person training which was very effective.

There are many online training options. Everyone who uses Tableau has taken at least one on-line class and these have been very useful.

They have been quite responsive, apart from the initial data sync problem where they were a bit less helpful. However, the problem did turn out to be on our side and not a shortcoming of the product, so really hard to criticize them too much for this.

The application is generally very easy to manipulate both for administrators and users. However, we do have some setup on individual desktop versions (setting up filters, etc) which takes some time.