Tableau Desktop - A Great BI Product
December 19, 2018
Tableau Desktop - A Great BI Product
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Desktop
It is used across the organization. All kinds of departments inside our company use Tableau. It solves hundreds of business problems. Tableau users report on the sales, revenue, quotes, product development and lots of other business processes. Data Sources like SAP BW, and Salesforce are slow when it comes to reporting on millions of rows of data. Tableau makes it easier for us to report on all this stuff.
- Scalability of Tableau is amazing. We have thousands of users who interact with the Tableau reports on a daily basis without any major issues. It is exactly like the bigger organizations like us need.
- Ease of use is another thing that is very good about Tableau. With a very less training, a user can start creating basic reports. As there are many Tableau users around the world, we get a lot of materials, videos online very easily.
- Beautiful visualizations are the best part of Tableau. Once you get the hang of Tableau, you can impress your boss by creating visually appealing dashboards. Many types of charts are available in Tableau, but if not, you will always find a way to create the visualization you need. Tableau never disappoint you.
- When creating a data source that needs several tables to be joined together, Tableau does its thing by loading the metadata, executing a query and loading data for preview. It does it after each and every join condition. Basically, every time you add a join condition you wait for a minute to create another one. God bless you if you are joining ten tables. There has to be way to pause this data load or at least some part of it to make this process faster.
- We had this issue of connection looping with Tableau. Even with a good connection, Tableau ask us to reconnect to the data source. This thing goes in an infinite loop until you hit "No" or "Cancel". And it doesn't exactly show in the log that why is it doing that. Logging needs to be improved.
- Tableau doesn't like Star or Snowflake schema even with a columnar database. We have these big Star schema (some of them are a little snowflaked) that we tried to load in Tableau. But they were slow. We converted those to the flat tables and Tableau works great with it.
- Pentaho and Qlik Sense
Pentaho has fewer visualizations and they haven't been making a lot of improvements in their visualization space. You can't really add a lot of customized visualizations as well. If Tableau has 100 features then Pentaho Analyzer has 10 with no ray of hope for improvements. Their ETL tool is actually the best in market. Tableau wins this game.
I haven't used Qlik Sense a lot, but just evaluated it. It is a pretty good tool but not as good as Tableau really. Data source preparation is fancy in Qlik Sense but it is easier in Tableau. I don't know much about Qlik's visualizations.
I haven't used Qlik Sense a lot, but just evaluated it. It is a pretty good tool but not as good as Tableau really. Data source preparation is fancy in Qlik Sense but it is easier in Tableau. I don't know much about Qlik's visualizations.