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

Creating manual and wildcard unions in Tableau Desktop to add additional rows of data

We use relationships to add additional fields to our data. For cases where we need to add additional rows from other tables or files, we use unions. We can union new data via manual union or wildcard union. We will look at both methods in the upcoming sections.

It is important to note that Tableau Desktop can create relationships and joins between tables, regardless of whether they are in the same database or across multiple databases (if the database supports cross-database joins). However, unions can only be created by tables in the same database. In the case of Microsoft Excel, this would mean the unions of multiple sheets within the same Excel workbook but not the ability to union across different workbooks.

Tableau Desktop can create unions across multiple text files. It is a common use case to get data dumps in the form of delimited files, which can then be joined together in Tableau...