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

Understanding the implications of an embedded data source versus a published data source

Tableau data models can be embedded in workbooks or accessible to many workbooks as published data sources.

We looked at the data model output options for Tableau Prep Builder in Chapter 6. We learned that Tableau Prep Builder can output to files, as well as output extracts as Tableau Hyper files, database tables, and published data sources. Most use cases of Tableau Prep Builder result in data models as published data sources to Tableau Server or Cloud.

In this section, we will look at publishing with embedded data sources and publishing data sources from Tableau Desktop:

  1. Picking up from our previous exercise, click on Sheet 1 to get a blank sheet. At this point, you might be prompted to create an extract. You can follow the default options to create an extract or click cancel to return to a live connection. Either type will work for the rest of this exercise.If the sheet is not...