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

Opening relationships to join at the physical layer through database joins

Before Tableau released the relationships feature, the only way to expand your analysis to use additional fields from a secondary table in Tableau was to create a join at the physical layer of the data.

Although relationships are the preferred method of combining tables to get additional fields, joins still have their use cases.

Cases where you might use joins are as follows:

  • When you know you are only supporting one use case in the Tableau workbook(s) that uses the model
  • When you want to filter data through your join
  • When you need to use an entity table for row-level security
  • When you are making a geospatial join

Let’s start by exploring the first two use cases, supporting a single use case and using the join for data filtering.

Single use case and using the join for a filter

When exploring joins in Chapter 8, we looked back to Chapter 4, when we joined the sales...