Tableau Enterprise

FEATURE ADOPTION – TABLEAU PREP

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Tableau Prep is a new product from Tableau designed to help Desktop users quickly and confidently combine, shape, and clean your data for analysis. The direct & visual experience gives you a deeper understanding of your data and makes data prep easier and more accessible.

  1. Tableau Prep cool features:
  • Desktop integration: Tableau Desktop can be launched to preview the results almost at any Prep steps
  • Data profiling pan: visualize data value and distributions
  • See your data at each of the data cleaning, shaping, filtering process
  • Repeatable process: Click ‘Run’ to get new output when source data changed
  • Push output to server

2. Tableau Prep limitations:

  • If you are doing data preparation mainly using Excel or join/union between CSV and other datasets, Tableau Prep is for you!
  • Prep does not replace any existing enterprise ETL tool
  • Prep has about 20 data source connectors while Desktop has 50+ connectors. Tableau is working on new Prep connectors
  • Prep output can’t be scheduled for auto refresh on Tableau server. Tableau is working on Tableau Prep server feature
  • A powerful PC or Mac would be needed for Prep to process complicated logic with large volume of data

3. Tableau Prep output:

  • Final Prep output can be .csv, or .tde or .hyper.  Both .tde and .hyper are Tableau data engine formats that can only be opened by Tableau Desktop. .Hyper is a new format that can only be opened by Tableau Desktop 10.5.* and above.
  • You can open your previousely saved .tfl Prep workflow for further editing
  • You can also open your previousely saved .tfl Prep workflow just to refresh output with data source changes
  • Prep output can be pushed to Tableau server as a published data source. However Tableau server can’t refresh Tableau Prep workflow.  Tableau Prep community outside is coming up some workaround for this.

4. Publish Prep output to Tableau server – detailed steps:

  • Publisher permission is required for this feature and again this is not for auto refresh
  • Add output from Prep flow
  • Select ‘Publish as a data source’
  • Select a server, sign-in, then type in full URL of your Tableau server….
  • Enter machine admin user name and password when asked.
  • After sign-in, select Project where you want the data source to be published
  • Give name of the data source to be published on serv
  • Description of the data source (option)
  • Click ‘Run Flow’

4 thoughts on “FEATURE ADOPTION – TABLEAU PREP”

  2. Thanks for sharing the descriptive information on Tutorial tutorial. It’s really helpful to me since I’m taking Tableau training. Keep doing the good work and if you are interested to know more on Tableau, do check this Tableau tutorial.:-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny6h82Qy4tA

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  3. As companies grow their self-service analytics capabilities, it becomes increasingly challenging to scale and manage these business-critical deployments, and increasingly complex to maintain good, consistent governance and security policies. In this session, come learn about Tableau’s newest offering to help tackle these challenges directly! The Tableau Server Management Add-on SKU includes capabilities that improve the manageability of Tableau Server clusters with workload management and enhanced monitoring, and other new features such as self-service content mobility and advanced encryption key management. This session will give a general overview of the add-on but will also deep dive into the content mobility capabilities and monitoring enhancements available in the initial release.

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    1. Tableau Server Management Add-on SKU Overall impression:
      Overall idea is very good to get CPU/Mem/Logs/Postgre data together for admin to have comprehensive pulses of your server – this is something that admins have been asking for long time. As V2019.3 is the first release of the server management add-on, the features can be a lot better. Current version is very hard to install, only works for Windows, limits to server workload under 1,800 views/hr, content migration tool does not handle passwords automatically yet – means that content migration tool is not designed for central IT team (unless central IT & publishers share same database password that is unlikely) to use but for each publisher to use.

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