Book Image

Data Modeling with Tableau

By : Kirk Munroe
Book Image

Data Modeling with Tableau

By: Kirk Munroe

Overview of this book

Tableau is unlike most other BI platforms that have a single data modeling tool and enterprise data model (for example, LookML from Google’s Looker). That doesn’t mean Tableau doesn’t have enterprise data governance; it is both robust and highly flexible. This book will help you effectively use Tableau governance models to build a data-driven organization. Data Modeling with Tableau is an extensive guide, complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and hands-on exercises. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll learn the role that Tableau Prep Builder and Tableau Desktop each play in data modeling. You’ll also explore the components of Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud that make data modeling more robust, secure, and performant. Moreover, by extending data models for Ask and Explain Data, you’ll gain the knowledge required to extend analytics to more people in their organizations, leading to better data-driven decisions. Finally, this book will guide you through the entire Tableau stack and the techniques required to build the right level of governance into Tableau data models for the correct use cases. By the end of this Tableau book, you’ll have a firm understanding of how to leverage data modeling in Tableau to benefit your organization.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: Data Modeling on the Tableau Platform
4
Part 2: Tableau Prep Builder for Data Modeling
9
Part 3: Tableau Desktop for Data Modeling
14
Part 4: Data Modeling with Tableau Server and Online

Setting performance options for relationships

In the previous two sections, we looked at relationships and how they differ from joins. As relationships are dynamic, they can sometimes create queries that could be better optimized by telling Tableau more about our data.

Performance Options is available in the user interface under the field mappings, as seen in Figure 8.35:

Figure 8.35 – Performance options

Figure 8.35 – Performance options

In most cases, the best practice is to leave the default options as-is unless we are 100% sure of our data. Let’s look at these two settings and why the default is best:

  • Cardinality: You can effectively use this to tell Tableau when a field is a unique key/index field. Using our example of product sales and the product catalog where product sales are on the left, we would want to leave Many on the left-hand side because a Product ID could be sold many times. If we were 100% sure we had no duplicates in our data – exactly...