Tableau Server

It's a bit too complex for average users to understand intuitively. We have a specific person at our company that is trained, and that limits the exposure of the Tableau platform to internal colleagues and stakeholders. Tableau really shows well, and when you get it right, it's the best around.

Well suited to just about any reporting need. We've been able to replace numerous other reporting packages with Tableau Server & Desktop. The only function Tableau lacks is the ability to produce multi-page, formatted, printable reports. Some folks really do need the long paper version.

I strongly recommend using it on big data analyzing scenarios. It's not a reporting system. If you want enterprise BI, please don't consider it. It is very suitable for self-service power users. And, IT staff won’t waste much effort implementing and managing it. The cost of Tableau Server is ok.

With big data, it can not publish to a server in a live connection and it forces us to extract it. The problem here is we have to refresh the extract manually.

Well suited for advanced analytics and managing disparate data sets into a central location. Cost constraints have held us back in bundling with our own external platform due to the need to license every connection.

Overall status on a data set is perfect in Tableau, plus you can drill into an area to look at more detail. A report with 'just' numbers is better created elsewhere. Tableau is for visualizations! I can hardly think of a report that couldn't use a visualization.

Tableau Server is great when it comes to data visualization and ease of manipulating the report without knowing any coding but as the size of the enterprise increases, Tableau server becomes an expensive proposition. One can not maintain a repository of previous reports and dashboards published which is a very basic requirement for any enterprise software.

For any data mining operations, business intelligence, executive dashboards, and enhanced live data representations I believe Tableau is a must tool. It is definitely cost efficient in the long term.

It is well suited to medium to large organizations that have large data to analyze. We are now in the information age and Tableau Server is necessary to make us more informed decisions for the business.

Although it is very hard to say when is Tableau Server the best option for an organization embracing the visual analytics wave, I included below a few points I consider relevant to any decision process. First, the obvious: is Tableau Desktop the best tool for building organization dashboards? Does it cover all needs or falls short on some particular requirements that may become rather impractical when designed in Tableau? Second: Out of the current (or expected) reports/dashboards, how many are (or will be) shared? Is it just a few, with the balance of them being in a tabular-format ? Do they require or would thy benefit from viewer comments or filtered shared views? Third: Who will design visualizations and what's their complexity? Is it the IT department, a set of Power-users or a Reporting Expert? What's the weight of each of those roles in the overall dashboard inventory? While the above only scratches the surface in the decision process, please think of it just as a bullet list on points you don't want to miss in your journey to a productive decision.

Tableau Server is well suited for organisations that want to enable staff across all levels to contribute to the data analysis process and who value insights from all of its members. It also suits organisations who want to ramp up their server quickly and who combine fast decision making with software that only requires short deployment cycles. It won't be as appropriate to use in environments where collaboration is frowned upon and where the control and access to valuable data is to remain in the hands and heads of a select group.

Yes, clean data visualisation is done in a simpler way and can be more efficient for the company if they want to store large amounts of data systematically and represent the same. I felt very impressed because the data that I needed to represent was large and Tableau was a perfect tool for me to work with. I would strongly recommend that others use the Tableau tool.

It is suited in scenarios where the user wants to know the status of anything without much interaction. Tableau provides a single window for all of the components of the system, and abstracts the complexity of management. Data demands Tableau and its visualization of data across the systems.

If you're in an organization that is all about having absolute command and control over the data and how it's used, Tableau may not be for you. Tableau has a commitment to democratizing data and an incredible focus on the user experience that is very much in line with our organizational values and goals. Tableau has made a business tool that is easy to use, incredibly powerful, and delightful to use. Doing exploratory analysis of fresh data with Tableau is like skiing in fresh powder, and Tableau Desktop is my favorite piece of software, ever.

Whether or not to recommend Tableau Server entirely depends on the needs in hand. Tableau Server is a commitment. It is well suited for a diverse, large audience of consumers that are supported by a full-blown technical team of administrators and developers. The primary benefit of Tableau Server over Tableau Desktop is that your data published from Tableau Desktop is available dynamically through a web application to all users. If a small to mid-size company is interested, I would suggest simply getting a Tableau Desktop license as a low-risk entry point. Tableau Desktop is a single application that one technical person with direct access to the data warehouse can utilize to build reports on their own computer. These local dynamic reports can be emailed or turned into .pdfs.

In short, a key question to ask is: how large is the user base that will consume reports and how actively will they interact with the data? Tableau Server offers high levels interaction and may be overkill for a smaller company with more basic reporting needs. Tableau Desktop is a low-cost alternative for a single user to own and distribute visually rich yet non-interactive reports manually via email.

The reporting made available in Tableau is often utilized by companies that do not directly own that Tableau account instance. It does not serve as a UI or API for those external stake-holders. Rather, the account owner must manually generate and send reports. It is less appropriate for providing on demand reporting and a controlled user interface for external clients. However, Tableau remains very well-suited to internal data uses of all kinds.

Tablea is a strong Clinical/Business Intelligence application. Tableau is a good fit for healthcare organizations.

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.

It is well suited in cases where the reporting format can be standardized and involves a high volume of data inputs. It may be too much "horsepower" for something that can be managed in an Excel format.

Rapid deployment of dashboards/reports is where Tableau Server would be most well suited.

Quick prototype reports: well suited. Folks who aren't into visual charts and want spreadsheets: not well suited.

Well suited for visualization, when users are expecting great quality for their charts, maps and other graphical forms.
Not suited for reporting on huge DWH, when users are expecting scheduled reports.