A few questions about Tableau

As I answer these, keep in mind that Tableau does not import the data from the original datasource - it merely processes and displays the results from queries sent to the original datasource.

1. Does Tableau support 64-bit in it's in-memory processing?

There is no benefit to Tableau supporting 64-bit for our processing.  The amount of data that is usefull to display is well withing the reach of 32 bit systems.  For example, my database has 1 billion rows and I want to display the sales trend for the past year.  Tableau only processes 12 rows of data in memory.  We do have customers that plot over 10 Million unique datapoints (e.g. a scatter plot with 10 million dots) but this is not common.

2. The max number of data can Tableau process is?

The real question is the maximum number of rows that Tableau can utilize.  The answer to this is that it is unlimited.  Tableau has customers utilizing 10's of billions of rows of data for their analysis.  The results from the queries are processed in memory, but again, this is typically many orders of magnitude smaller than the original data source.

3. Does Tableau have plan to support more chart type,eg. pie chart,radar chart... ... ?

Yes.  Even though we support all the chart types considered as 'best practice'  by analysis guru's - we are continuing to consider additional chart type for future versions of Tableau.

4. Does Tableau support "drill down/up" ? or, have another way to realize that?

Yes.  When using OLAP data sources you can right click on a member and drill up or down.  When using relational datasources you can simply add another field to the view to drill anywhere or add a sheet link to enable drilling to any detail sheet you desire - even details in a different database!

Marc,

How can I learn more about this, or an example:

"4. Does Tableau support "drill down/up" ? or, have another way to realize that?

Yes. When using OLAP data sources you can right click on a member and drill up or down. When using relational datasources you can simply add another field to the view to drill anywhere or add a sheet link to enable drilling to any detail sheet you desire - even details in a different database!"?

Michael W Cristiani

Market Intelligence Group, LLC

mike@migsite.com

Hi,

You can download a variety of technical whitepapers from our whitepapers page, which is part of the product center.

>>> Does Tableau have plan to support more chart type,eg. pie chart,radar chart... ... ?

Any updates yet on supporting pie charts / radar charts?

Sorry I meant SPIDER / radar charts.... 

I know that we are already able to do pie charts.

Thanks,

Andrea

I'd add support for radar charts - may not be the best form of chart for most situations but there are some datasets, particularly when looking at the coverage of 2/3 different entities which are being compared (e.g. sRGB gamut against AdobeRGB), where radar/spider charts are effective.

I really would like to see an option for 3D Pie Charts , especially the ability to seperate certain sections of the Pie Chart to emphasise a particular segment/ portion of the total population.

Currently I am importing the data generated by Tableau into Excel to do the pie charts. It would be nice if I could do it all in Tableau.

I have a key requirement to be able to produce both Standard Reports and Interactive Reports from the one application and I am seeking to assess the capability of Tableau to meet this need.

Standard Reports will be based on the production of reports that will be produced without any intervention from us so they can be delivered to users immediately after their survey closes.

Standard Reports will not include and capacity for the user to interact with the data.

However, I also have a requirement to provide more some users with the capability to drill-down for further analysis. In the initial stages this would involve providing users with a Tableau Workbook that contains Enhanced Reports in which drill-down capability has been embedded.

As the capacity of users to interact with the data grows, I will provide more Advanced Users with direct web-access (Tableau Server) so they can aggregate data and interact directly with the data to produce their own Advanced Reports.

Tableau provides nicely for this growth path from Standard Reports to Enhanced Reports to Advanced Reports as users gain experience and confidence in interacting with their data.

However, I have not been able to work out from the material on the Tableau website whether the Standard Reports and Enhanced Reports can be generated by sending the equivalent of a batch processing 'command file' to Tableau Desktop to produce a specific report and extract the data into a Tableau Workbook so that Users can undertake further drill-down analysis of their data using Tableau Reader.

We need to be able to automate this part of the process for Standard Reports that users can access as a first stage — including basic drill-down — because of the large number of reports that are generated.

We could program an 'automation' script if it is not possible to interact with Tableau via a 'command file', but that would not be as elegant as submitting a set of parameters via a command file.

Is there an interface or access to the functionality in Tableau that will allow us to generate the Standard Reports in an automated way so they can be attached to an email and sent to the user?

Please don't surrender to these inane requests.  Holding the bar for dataviz quality may impact sales to some extent - but so be it!

Only those variables which are used in the worksheet can be used in the TITLE. For example to use the variable "NAME" in the title of the sheet, we need to drop this variable to the ROW/COLUMN shelf of the sheet.

Can we get the variable in the TITLE without droping this variable on the sheet?

Sindhu,

If you want to have a field on the worksheet for use in the Title, you can place it on the Level of Detail shelf. If placing the field there changes the view, then you may want to try making it an Attribute, that will wrap it in ATTR(). If that does not work, there are other options available.