Skip to main content

Featured post

Golf Solutions Designed at Barnham Broom Golf Club in Norfolk

 Many sports tend to be biassed towards one sex or another. For example, football is a sport dominated by men and does not become much more masculine than rugby! On the other side of the fence, netball definitely falls into the women's category. However, there are some sports that share gender gracefully, which appeal to both men and women. Reddit live streaming Golf is undoubtedly one of these sports and has no age limits. Spread across courses in the UK you will find some unlikely groups of people bound by their love for this great outdoor sport. Some will play every day, while others will only play on the weekends, perhaps as a way to relieve the stress of a difficult week at the office. No golfer tends to join a club and membership packages vary widely in price. Most golf clubs simply offer standard packages with the assumption that one size fits all and offers a bit of flexibility. However, some offer more realistic membership packages, considering how much you will be playing...

Tableau 9.0 release date and overview

Tableau Software has finally released the new version of its benchmark setting data visualization and business intelligence platform, Tableau 9.0 today on April 7th 2015. The new version comes with an entirely new experience for Tableau Server, significant performance improvements, new data preparation features, drag-and-drop analytics, updates to mapping and much more.


Tableau 8 has been a phenomenal success[1] for data visualization and business intelligence platform provider Tableau Software after the release of Tableau 8.3, everybody was waiting for the new version : Tableau 9. Tableau 9 release date is postponed a few times. In Tableau Conference 2013, the expectation was that Tableau 8.1 would be released in fall 2013, Tableau 8.2 in winter 2014 and Tableau 9.0 later in 2014. Tableau 9.0 release date is later pushed to Q1 2015 and in March one more time to April 2015.

But this is a release worth waiting. There are many significant improvements in Tableau 9.0 over Tableau 8.3 which makes already powerful Tableau Software more competitive.

Tableau User Experience Improvements

Ease of use and flawless data analysis process has always been in the core of Tableau and the company is wisely investing more in this core strength with exiting new features. One of the most significant new feature in the front-end is ad-hoc calculations. You can now write expressions directly on the rows and columns shelves or mark cards with a simple double click. You can later drag these ad-hoc calculations to Data Window to make them reusable calculations.

Tableau 9 Review - Ad-Hoc Calculations
Tableau 9 Ad-hoc calculations feature

A new Analytics Pane in Tableau 9 makes common techniques such as reference lines, bands, totals, trend lines and forecasts readily available by a simple drag-and-drop. Another feature related to Tableau's analytics capabilities is Instant Analytics which provides an interactive experience for comparing summary information about subset of marks to all marks in the view.

New level of details calculation is another exiting new feature which allows you to create arbitrary aggregates in charts without complex and cumbersome expressions. For example, with this new feature, you can easily calculate average sale per customer in each time period by a simple, nested Level of Details Calculation (LOD). LOD syntax also allows you to create fixed values not effected by level of detail in the charts.

Data Connection and Preparation Improvements

Tableau 9.0 now supports Kerberos authentication for Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Server Analysis Service and Cloudera Impala. adds data extraction API for Mac OS and offers new and improved data connectors such as SPSS, SAS and R.

Recently, almost every Tableau release adds more data preparation functionality. Tableau 9.0 is not an exception. Tableau now can detect the range of data in MS Excel files, unpivot tables (converts a cross-tab table to straight table), split data in multiple fields.

Tableau 9 Performance Improvements

Tableau data engine, the in-memory analytics database of Tableau platform, was introduced in Tableau 6 and went through performance improvements since than. But Tableau 9 seems the be the biggest jump. In the presentation, a bar-chart aggregated from 173 million rows of data took 0.7 seconds in Tableau 9 compared to  7 seconds performance of Tableau 8.3 (10x faster)!

As this individual query performance is not enough. Tableau 9 data engine also introduces parallel queries concept. If you have a Tableau dashboard with 3 charts and you do something to trigger a query (i.e. filtering dashboard), each chart queries the database one after another in sequence. In the presentation, a 3 chart dashboard took 9.5 seconds to load. In Tableau 9 it takes 1.1 seconds. Not only individual queries are faster, they also run parallel (provided that underlying database supports parallel queries).

And then comes query fusion. Even if you run parallel queries, why to run a the same query twice if two charts in the view has similar queries which can be run once. Tableau Query Fusion looks at the dashboards and finds way to simply the queries into simple queries.

Suppose that you have two sheets in a dashboard : Sum of Rides per Hour and Average Tip per Hour. In Tableau 8.3, these two will fire 2 individual queries (in sequence) to database. But in Tableau 9, because these two has the same level of details, they will be fused into a single query and run fast. A sample run for 173 million rows takes 3.7 seconds in Tableau 8.3 but only 1.7 seconds in Tableau 9 thanks to query fusion.

So Tableau 9 offers faster queries, parallel queries and thanks to Query Fusion, less queries. And thanks to new External Query Catching, it also offers no queries. Tableau 9 will cash queries in server and desktop and run no queries to database if there is no chance there. In an example run, a 3 sheet dashboard running 9.7 seconds in Tableau 8.3 took only 0.2 seconds to run. 50x improvements.

One of the most desired feature for Tableau 9 is visual ETL (Extraction Transformation and Load) functionality for data quality, validation and cleaning (and data modeling if possible).  Tableau 8.2's "visual data window" seems to be the first step to that direction but we will wait and see if this would be a new feature. Although there are very powerful visual ETL tools which can work seamlessly with Tableau such as Alteryx and Clover ETL, it would be nice to see some more features in this domain with Tableau 9.

On the predictive analytics domain, we expect more functionality in Tableau such as more predictive models and control in newly introduced forecasting feature and better integration with R (current Tableau version can do 4 functions passing parameters to R Server).

We will update this post as more information is revealed about Tableau 9.

[1] - Tableau's Building the 'Google for Data'
[2] - Tableau Gives Up Gains: Estimates Rise, Targets Decline, on Upbeat Q1, Forecast
[3] - Tableau Conference 2014 – A Field Report
[4] - Data Visualization with Tableau

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is JEDOX?

Jedox is a Self Service Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management platform developed by Jedox AG based in Freiburg im Breisgau/Germany. With a modular structure, JEDOX platform uses Microsoft Excel as its user interface on the one hand and a Jedox-specific spreadsheet on the other, both of which can be used in all common browsers. Jedox is unique in a sense that while most business intelligence solutions try to replace MS Excel based analysis and planning process entirely with their platform (and usually fails to do so because at one point things are exported to Excel), Jedox puts the powerful MS Excel sheet in the heart of their solution. By doing this they provide a familiar interface to users while enhancing business intelligence capabilities far beyond MS Excel. This is actually what JEDOX offers in a nutshell : Excel Plus. The modular architecture of JEDOX has a cell-oriented, multi-dimensional in-memory OLAP server that has been especially designed for...

Data Analytics for Online Shops

Making shopping a smooth and easy experience is the goal of many online shops. But how can easy website navigation be optimized? Unlike the physical shops, you cannot talk to the sales people in the online shops and a customer should find his or her way through the online shop. And unlike pysical shops, online shops can have hundreds of thousands of visitors every day. To optimize the shopping experience, some important questions should be answered : Why do customers put products into their shopping cart and do not buy them at the end? Was it because of the sales process or he/she liked another product simply better? What impact has a customer's drop from a detail page? Where are the differences in customer behavior depending on the different product groups, Customer types or assortments? What are the figures compared to the previous year? Were there any technical errors? Was the accessibility of all pages always guaranteed? Traditionally, answering these questions require a lot of...

Hands on Power BI Workshop in Singapore - Dashboard in a Day

Power BI Dashboard in a day is a hands-on workshop for Business Analysts, covering the breadth of Power BI capabilities. At the end of the workshop you will Understand the value of Power BI Have basic exposure with the product to be able to use it when they return to their office Understand how Power BI differentiates from the competition and become Power BI advocates in their organization Know what the next steps to learn more about Power BI and become part of the community. The workshop is 200 SGD per attendee. See below for the agenda. Date       : 15 February 2019 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM Venue     :  87 Beach Road Chye Sing Building #03-01 Singapore, Singapore 189695 Agenda  : Morning – Introduction to Power BI and Power BI Desktop overview – Power BI Desktop – Lab – Lunch and demos Afternoon – Power BI Service overview – Power BI service – Lab – Bring your own data and build dashboards – Q&A