Introduction A few days ago, I wrote about feeling like I was in the Tableau “Data Zone” and the confidence this has given me when working with a wide array of data. I really didn’t think anyone would read the post, but for some reason I was wrong. Every time I write something that seems to me…
Background My brain has been assembling the thoughts discussed in this blog post for the past year and all these thoughts are mine. I completely own them and they are strictly my perspectives. No one has ever asked me to write this blog post or any other post, but I will readily admit that I have…
Introduction The Tableau data reshaper is an outstanding tool and you should have it in your toolbox of Tableau techniques if you are serious about doing a lot of data analytics in Tableau.
Introduction I have used many hundreds of comma-delimited (*.csv) files with Tableau over the past few years. I like to use csv files because Tableau reads them really fast and I can easily build gigantic files. Over the years, I have been using business-related files that have continued to increase in size from thousands, to millions,…
Introduction About two months ago, I received a few files that contained patient hospitalization data from a group of hospitals. For this, I will be forever grateful because I’ve had a lot of fun working with the data. After giving me the files, one senior analyst told me: “Good luck to you because no one has ever been…
Introduction In the past couple of blog posts, I’ve been writing about how I get data ready for analysis in Tableau. One special data condition that arises is the data type that I’ll call an alpha-numeric field. This data type can be tricky to work with, so you have to pay attention to the details…
Introduction Rarely, if ever, does data arrive to me in the exact format that I need it to be in for efficient analysis in Tableau. This means something has to be done to the data before I can use it. In Part 1 of this series, I provide specific examples of real-world data format changes…
Introduction It does not happen often, but whenever I get a flat file (i.e., fixed-width ASCII file) to work with, I have to work some magic on the file to get it ready for Tableau. This post describes how some of that magic happens.
Introduction I guess you can say that I’ve been on a mission lately to understand and document the performance, capabilities, and limitations of Tableau Desktop software. Today I decided to answer the following question: When is it necessary to switch from a professional workstation to a “big-data platform” to analyze large structured data files with…
Introduction I have always liked to benchmark computer programs. For that reason, I thought it would be fun to see how fast Tableau is in reading typical structured data sets that I have used in Process Improvement work. The question I want to specifically answer is: How fast does Tableau read data from a character-separated…
Introduction Yesterday and earlier today, I had a chance to experiment with Tableau coupled to Amazon Redshift. What I am about to write isn’t totally comprehensive, but if I had this knowledge yesterday morning, I would have saved a few hours of work. Hopefully this information will save you some time, too, if you try…
Introduction If you work with large, diverse data sets, you know that there will invariably be noise and erroneous data in the database you are using. This is one reason why I treat all data as guilty until proven innocent.