
Michael, a data scientist, who is working for a German railway and logistics company, recently told me during an FATUG Meetup that he loves Tableau’s R and Pyhton integration. As he continued, he raised the raised the question for using functions they have written in Julia. Julia, a high-level dynamic programming language for high-performance numerical analysis, is an integral part of newly developed data strategy in the Michael’s organization.
Tableau, however, does not come with native support for Julia. I didn’t want to keep Michael’s team down and was looking for an alternative way to integrate Julia with Tableau.
This solution is working flawless in a production environment since several months. In this tutorial I’m going to walk you through the installation and connecting Tableau with R and Julia. I will also give you an example of calling a Julia statement from Tableau to calculate the sphere volume.
1. Install Julia and add PATH variable
You can download Julia from julialang.org. Add Julia’s installation path to the PATH environment variable.
2. Install R, XRJulia and RServe
You can download base R from r-project.org. Next, invoke R from the terminal to install the XRJulia and the RServe packages:
> install.packages("XRJulia")
> install.packages("Rserve")
XRJulia provides an interface from R to Julia. RServe is a TCP/IP server which allows Tableau to use facilities of R.
3. Load libraries and start RServe
After packages are successfully installed, we load them and run RServe:
> library(XRJulia)
> library(Rserve)
> Rserve()
Make sure to repeat this step everytime you restart your R session.
4. Connecting Tableau to RServe
Now let’s open the Help menu in Tableau Desktop and choose Settings and Performance >Manage External Service connection to open the External Service Connection dialog box:
Enter a server name using a domain or an IP address and specify a port. Port 6311 is the default port used by Rserve. Take a look on my R tutorial to learn more about Tableau’s R integration.
5. Adding Julia code to a Calculated Field
You can invoke Calculated Field functions called SCRIPT_STR, SCRIPT_REAL, SCRIPT_BOOL, and SCRIPT_INT to embed your Julia code in Tableau, such as this simple snippet that calculates sphere volume:
SCRIPT_INT(' | |
library(XRJulia) | |
if (!exists("ev")) ev <- RJulia() | |
y <- juliaEval(" | |
4 / 3 * %s * ' + STR([Factor]) + ' * pi ^ 3 | |
", .arg1) | |
', | |
[Radius]) |
6. Use Calculated Field in Tableau
You can now use your Julia calculation as an alternate Calculated Field in your Tableau worksheet:

Feel free to download the Tableau Packaged Workbook (twbx)Â here.
Further reading: Mastering Julia
Learn how #R allows #Tableau to execute #Julia code on the fly! #tutorial #datascience #data17 #protip https://t.co/8gAsDkhkAA pic.twitter.com/cjfuFTsRJj
— Alexander Loth (@xlth) October 11, 2017