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)

Preparing Tableau Prep to work with R

R is a statistical programming language favored by many data scientists. It is available free of charge and benefits from a vast online community for ideation and support. To find out more about R, visit https://www.r-project.org/about.html. R by itself does not support interaction with other applications such as Tableau Prep. In order to extend R with that functionality, we need to install Rserve in addition to R itself.

Important note

The R programming language and the R and RStudio application interfaces are not part of Tableau Prep; they are separate technologies. An in-depth look at R is beyond the scope of this book. However, every system is slightly different, and you may run into unexpected challenges. For help, please refer to the R website: https://cran.r-project.org.

In this recipe, we will provide general guidance for configuring your system successfully.

Getting ready

To follow along with this recipe, download the Sample...