Tableau is a simple yet powerful tool used for Data Visualization in the business intelligence industry. Using tableau you can simplify raw data into an easily understandable format. The visualizations created by the tableau are in the form of Dashboards and Worksheets.
Uses of Tableau
The tableau product suite consists of the following:
Data analysis is the process of inspecting the data, transforming the data, Modeling the given data to discover useful information and decision making. You can classify Data Analytics in tableau into two sections for a clear understanding.
The tools that are used for creating Dashboards, Charts, Worksheets, Report generation, and Visualizations are called developer tools. The Tableau Desktop and Tableau Public come under this category.
The Tableau desktop allows you to code, customize, create charts, reports, and blending them all together to create a dashboard and all the other related work has been done here.
You can do live data analysis by connecting the tableau desktop to the data warehouse and other types of files. you can share the created dashboard and workbooks either locally and publicly.
Based on the connectivity to the data sources and sharing options you can classify Tableau Desktop into two types as follow:
The Tableau public is specially built for cost-effective users, the workbook which is created can't be saved locally, sequentially, it should be saved to Tableau's public cloud which can be viewed and accessed by anyone.
This version is best for the ones who want to learn and share their data with the general public.
The products which are created using Developer tools are shared using sharing tools. Following are the tools that come under this category:
It is an online sharing tool for the tableau. The functionalities are similar to the tableau server, but the data is stored on the servers hosted in the cloud which are maintained by the tableau group.
There is no storage limit on the data that can be published in Tableau Online. Tableau Online creates a direct link to over 40 data sources that are hosted in the cloud such as MySQL, Hive, Amazon Aurora, Spark SQL, and many more.
To publish, both Tableau Online and Server require the workbooks created by Tableau Desktop. Data that is streamed from the web applications say Google Analytics, Salesforce.com are also supported by Tableau Server and Tableau Online.
You can use the tableau server to share Workbooks, Visualizations which are created by the tableau desktop application across the organization.
To share dashboards in the Tableau Server, you must first publish your work on the Tableau Desktop. Once the work has been uploaded to the server, it will be accessible only to licensed users.
However, It's not necessary that the licensed users need to have the Tableau Server installed on their machine. You just require the log in credentials with which they can check reports via a web browser.
The security is high in the Tableau server, and it is much suited for quick and effective sharing of data in an organization.
Tableau Reader is a free tool that allows you to view the workbooks and visualizations created using Tableau Desktop or Tableau Public. The data can be filtered but editing and modifications are restricted.
The security level is zero in Tableau Reader as anyone who gets the workbook can view it using Tableau Reader.
To share the dashboards that you have created, the receiver should have Tableau Reader to view the document.
You can use Tableau to connect and extract the data stored in various places. You can pull data from any platform using Tableau.
A simple database such as an excel, pdf, to a complex database like Oracle, and a database in the cloud such as Amazon Web services, Microsoft Azure SQL database, Google Cloud SQL, and various other data sources can be extracted by Tableau.
When you launch Tableau, the ready data connectors are available that allow you to connect to any database.
You can pull the data either by connecting the live or extracted to Tableau's data engine and Tableau Desktop. The data engineer and data analyst will work here with the data that was pulled up and develop visualizations.
You can share the created dashboards with the users as a static file and these dashboards can be viewed using the Tableau Reader by the user.
You can publish the data from the Tableau Desktop to the Tableau server. This is an enterprise platform where collaboration, distribution, governance, security model, automation features are supported.
With the Tableau Server, you have a better experience in accessing the files from all the locations like desktop, mobile, or email.
Tableau has a highly scalable, n-tier client-server architecture that serves mobile clients, web clients, and desktop-installed software. Tableau Desktop is the authoring and publishing tool that is used to create shared views on Tableau Server.
The Primary component of the Tableau Architecture is the Data sources that it can connect to. You can connect Tableau to multiple data sources. These data sources are on-premise or remotely located. You can connect a data server to a database, excel file, and web application all at the same time.
Tableau can connect data from heterogeneous environments and blend the data from multiple data sources and it can make the relationship between various types of data sources.
It provides an interface to connect external data sources to the Tableau data server. The Tableau has an in-built ODBC/SQL connector. You can connect this ODBC connector to any database without using their native connector.
Tableau has an option to select both live and extracted data. Based on the usage, one can be easily switched between extracted and live data.
You can access the real-time data by linking Tableau to the external database directly. Sending the dynamic MDX and SQL statements allows you to use the infrastructure of the existing database system. This feature helps in linking to the live data with Tableau rather than importing the data.
It makes good that the investment is done by an organization on a fast and optimized database system. The size of the database is huge and is updated periodically in many enterprises, In those cases, connecting to the live data the tableau works as a front-end visualization tool.
Tableau has an option to extract the data from external data sources. You can make a local copy in the form of a Tableau extract file. And the millions of records in the Tableau data engine are extracted in a single click.
Tableau Data engine uses the RAM, ROM, and Cache memory to store and process the data. Using filters, You can extract some records from the dataset. This improves the performance of the tableau while working with a huge dataset.
Three different servers are present in the Tableau Server:
The gateway works as a distributor to processes various components, it transfers requests from users to tableau components and the client's requests are forwarded to an external load balancer for processing.
In case of the absence of a load balancer, the gateway works as a load balancer. For single-server configuration, One primary server manages all the processes. For multiple server configurations, one physical system works as a primary server, while others are used as worker servers.
The visualizations and dashboards can be viewed and edited using different clients in the tableau server. The different clients are Tableau Desktop, Web Browser, and Mobile Applications.