Welcome to the Tableau section of my blog, where I share my knowledge and experience with one of the world’s most popular data visualization tools. As someone who has worked with and used Tableau for years, I’m passionate about helping others master this powerful tool and make the most of its capabilities.
In this section, you’ll find a variety of tutorials on topics such as building visualizations, creating dashboards, and using Tableau’s advanced features. I’ll also share stories and insights from my time working with Tableau, including tips and tricks for getting the most out of the tool.
Whether you’re new to Tableau or an experienced user looking to take your skills to the next level, these tutorials and stories will give you the practical knowledge and insight you need to succeed. I believe Tableau has the power to change the way we think about and interact with data, and I’m excited to share that vision with others.
So join me on this journey as we explore the world of Tableau together and discover new ways to unlock the full potential of your data.
Are you ready for Tableau Conference 2018? Don’t miss my Social Media Analytics sessions!
Why do we need Social Media Analytics?
Social Media Analytics transforms raw data from social media platforms into insight, which in turn leads to new business value.
What will your learn in this sessions?
Once you dive into Social Media Analytics, how do you bring it to the next level? Social data can offer powerful insights right away. In this session, you will learn how to build a mature social data program from that foundation and strategies for scaling a social data programme, as well as how to connect directly to your social media data with a web data connector; considerations for building scalable data sources; and tips for using metadata and calculations for more sophisticated analysis.
Where and when are the sessions?
Do you want to learn more about Social Media Analytics with Tableau? Meet me at the 2018 Tableau Conferences in London or New Orleans and join my sessions:
Kürzlich habe ich einige Blog-Posts zum Thema Datenstrategie veröffentlicht. Für viele Unternehmen geht die Entwicklung und Einführung einer Datenstrategie nicht tief genug. Häufig habe ich ähnliches gehört: „So weit ist unser Unternehmen noch gar nicht. Wir haben noch viel operativ vorzubereiten, bevor wir eine Datenstrategie voll umfänglich etablieren können.“
Ich habe in diesen Gesprächen nachgehakt, wo diese grundlegenden Lücken in den Unternehmen bestehen, und entschlossen eine neue Blog-Post-Serie aufzusetzen, um zum Thema Data Operations (#dataops) konkrete und einfach umsetzbare Vorschläge zu geben.
Daten für die Analyse vorbereiten
Eine der wesentlichen Fragen, die sich Datenanalysten immer wieder stellen, lautet: „Gibt es eine Möglichkeit meine Daten für die Verwendung mit Analysewerkzeugen, wie Tableau, optimal vorzubereiten?“
Daten können auf unterschiedliche Arten strukturiert sein. Die meisten neuen Tableau-Anwender erliegen der Versuchung, Tableau mit einem bereits formatierten und voraggregierten Excel-Bericht (siehe Abbildung 1.1) zu verbinden und diesen in Tableau zu visualisieren. Heißt es nicht mit Tableau können Daten jeder Art einfach und intuitiv verwenden werden? Sehr schnell stellt man fest, dass ein solches Vorgehen nicht funktioniert, wie erwartet und sich so auch keine Visualisierungen erstellen lassen.
Abbildung 1.1: Bereits formatierter und voraggregierter Excel-Bericht
Dieses Szenario, dem viele Einsteiger begegnen, ist nicht ungewöhnlich und tatsächlich ein häufiger Stolperstein bei der Einarbeitung in Tableau, der die Analyse Ihrer Daten erschweren kann.
Die folgenden Punkte zeigen Ihnen Vorschläge zur sauberen Vorbereitung Ihrer Daten anhand des Beispielberichts:
Verzichten Sie auf den einleitenden Text („Temperaturmessung zum Monatsbeginn“).
Überführen Sie hierarchische Überschriften („Frankfurt“, „Berlin“) auf eine Spalteninformation (neue Spalte „Ort“).
Pivotisieren Sie Daten von einer „weiten“ Kreuztabelle mit Variablen in Spalten („Früh“, „Mittag“, „Abend“) in eine „lange“ Tabelle, die die Variablen stets in den Zeilen trägt (in diesem Beispiel die Uhrzeit).
Nutzen Sie vollständige Datums- und ggf. Zeitformate („01.04.2018 06:00“) anstatt z.B. nur den Monatsnamen („April“).
Überprüfen Sie, dass Zahlen im Zahlenformat und nicht im Textformat gespeichert sind.
Verzichten Sie voraggregierte Daten („Durchschnitt“, „Gesamtdurchschnitt“).
Entfernen Sie leere Zeilen.
Achten Sie darauf, dass jede Spate eine aussagekräftige Spaltenüberschrift trägt.
Haben Sie diese Vorschläge befolgt, ist aus Ihrer „weiten“ Kreuztabelle nun eine „lange“ Zeilen-basierte Tabelle geworden, und damit die perfekte Basis zur umfangreichen Datenanalyse (siehe Abbildung 1.2).
Abbildung 1.2: Zur Datenanalyse geeignete „lange Tabelle“ ohne Aggregationen
Join us for the global launch of Tableau’s super fast data engine, Hyper! Hyper brings faster data refreshes and query performance to Tableau extracts, plus increased scalability in a platform-wide update.
This is your opportunity to get to know the Hyper dev team, hear from Tableau beta customers about their hands-on Hyper experience, and participate in live Q&A. Best of all, learn more about Hyper’s patent-pending technology as well as some of the other features headed your way in 10.5. (Viz in Tooltip, anyone?)
Tableau is hosting the Hyperfest meetup – come and celebrate with the community and the world on the upcoming release of Hyper. In addition to the Hyper presentation, we will also have food, drinks and Tableau swag, so don’t miss it!
The Future of Enterprise Analytics: Hyper can handle both OLTP and OLAP simultaneously. In the future it will address NoSQL and graph workloads.
1. What is Hyper’s key benefit?
Hyper is a Hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP) database system and replaces Tableau Data Extracts (TDE). The change will be mostly transparent for end users, other than everything being faster. Hyper significantly improves extract refresh times, query times and overall performance.
2. What is Hybrid transactional/analytical processing?
Hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP) is an emerging application architecture that „breaks the wall“ between transaction processing and analytics. It enables more informed and „in business real time“ decision making.
The two areas of online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) present different challenges for database architectures. Currently, customers with high rates of mission-critical transactions have split their data into two separate systems, one database for OLTP and one so-called data warehouse for OLAP. While allowing for decent transaction rates, this separation has many disadvantages including data freshness issues due to the delay caused by only periodically initiating the Extract Transform Load (ETL) data staging and excessive resource consumption due to maintaining two separate information systems.
3. Does Hyper satisfy the ACID properties?
Hyper, initially developed at the Technical University of Munich and acquired by Tableau in 2016, can handle both OLTP and OLAP simultaneously. Hyper possesses the rare quality of being able to handle data updates and insertions at the same time as queries by using hardware-assisted replication mechanisms to maintain consistent snapshots of the transactional data. Hyper is an in-memory database that guarantees the ACID properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) of OLTP transactions and executes OLAP query sessions (multiple queries) on the same, arbitrarily current and consistent snapshot.
4. What makes Hyper so fast?
The utilization of the processor-inherent support for virtual memory management (address translation, caching, copy on update) yields both at the same time: unprecedentedly high transaction rates as high as 100,000 per second and very fast OLAP query response times on a single system executing both workloads in parallel. This would support real-time streaming of data in future releases of Tableau. These performance increases come from the nature of the Hyper data structures, but also from smart use of contemporary hardware technology, and particularly nvRam memory. Additional cores provide a linear increment in performance.
5. What does this mean for Tableau?
With Hyper now powering the Tableau platform, your organization will see faster extract creation and better query performance for large data sets. Since Hyper is designed to handle exceptionally large data sets, you can choose to extract your data based on what you need, not data volume limitations. Hyper improves performance for common computationally-intensive queries, like count distinct, calculated fields, and text field manipulations. This performance boost will improve your entire Enterprise Analytics workflow.
Julia in Tableau: R allows Tableau to execute Julia code on the fly, enhancing your data analytics experience.
Michael, a data scientist, who is working for a German railway and logistics company, recently told me during a FATUG Meetup that he loves Tableau’s R integration and Tableau’s Python integration. As he continued, he raised the question of using functions they have written in Julia. Julia, a high-level dynamic programming language for high-performance numerical analysis, is an integral part of the newly developed data strategy in 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 flawlessly in a production environment for 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.
XRJulia provides an interface from R to Julia. RServe is a TCP/IP server that 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 every time 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 at 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:
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You can now use your Julia calculation as an alternate Calculated Field in your Tableau worksheet:
Using Julia calculations within Tableau (click to enlarge)
Feel free to download the Tableau Packaged Workbook (twbx) here.
Further Reading: Mastering Julia
If you want to go beyond this tutorial and explore more about Julia in the context of data science, I recommend the book Mastering Julia. You can find it here.
Further Reading: Visual Analytics with Tableau
Join the data science conversation and follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn for more tips, tricks, and tutorials on Julia in Tableau and other data analytics topics. If you’re looking to master Tableau, don’t forget to preorder your copy of my upcoming book, Visual Analytics with Tableau. (Amazon). It offers an in-depth exploration of data visualization techniques and best practices.
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