Book Image

Tableau Prep Cookbook

By : Hendrik Kleine
Book Image

Tableau Prep Cookbook

By: Hendrik Kleine

Overview of this book

Tableau Prep is a tool in the Tableau software suite, created specifically to develop data pipelines. This book will describe, in detail, a variety of scenarios that you can apply in your environment for developing, publishing, and maintaining complex Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) data pipelines. The book starts by showing you how to set up Tableau Prep Builder. You’ll learn how to obtain data from various data sources, including files, databases, and Tableau Extracts. Next, the book demonstrates how to perform data cleaning and data aggregation in Tableau Prep Builder. You’ll also gain an understanding of Tableau Prep Builder and how you can leverage it to create data pipelines that prepare your data for downstream analytics processes, including reporting and dashboard creation in Tableau. As part of a Tableau Prep flow, you’ll also explore how to use R and Python to implement data science components inside a data pipeline. In the final chapter, you’ll apply the knowledge you’ve gained to build two use cases from scratch, including a data flow for a retail store to prepare a robust dataset using multiple disparate sources and a data flow for a call center to perform ad hoc data analysis. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to create, run, and publish Tableau Prep flows and implement solutions to common problems in data pipelines.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Chapter 4: Data Aggregation

Tableau Prep is designed with data preparation for analytics in mind. When it comes to reporting and analytics, more data is not always better, especially if you have a particular report in mind that you want to create. Pre-aggregating your data in a data preparation tool such as Tableau Prep instead of your business intelligence tool may result in significant performance gains when it comes to rendering your report.

In this chapter, you'll find recipes to help you prepare your data for analytics. Aggregation is a key part of data preparation. Aggregating your data appropriately in a Tableau Prep workflow can significantly reduce the output size. A smaller dataset will be more performant when connecting any analytics application, including Tableau Desktop.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following recipes:

  • Determining granularity
  • Aggregating values
  • Using fixed LOD calculations for grouping data
  • Grouping data