Speed up Tableau with Exasol

November 9, 2020 | Data Management | Slavko Kastelic

Speed up Tableau with Exasol and say goodbye to slow performances forever.

Tableau is a well-known data visualisation tool that has been around since 2003. It has a large customer base and products that generate graph-type data visualizations. The company was acquired by Salesforce for $15.7 billion in August 2019. Salesforce thus fulfilled its strategic masterplan to combine enterprise data on one platform.

Tableau was always side by side with the biggest names in the industry, such as PowerBI, Qlik, or MicroStrategy. Gartner recognized Tableau as a leader in the industry for several consecutive years. However, company has not gone without its share of challenges along the way, especially performance-wise.

Making trade-offs for performance improvements 

To overcome the performance challenges in the past, Tableau offered constant help to its customers, giving different pieces of advice for performance optimization on their community portal. The speed of working with Tableau was always dependent on the number of records.

This speed of data analysis can refer to working in Tableau Desktop on a large corporate database that users access remotely or loading views or dashboards that users access on their desktop from Tableau Server. No matter how you accessed the data, if you worked with hundreds of millions of records, you were sure to make some trade-offs in order to wait less time for the results. Users were expected to ask themselves if they really needed all the data for their analysis or just a subset. This questions are forcing them to puzzle the big picture together.

Paired with the best to become the best

Despite all the tips & tricks, Tableau lacked one key component and that was the speed, disregarding the number of records a user was working with.

In 2017, the company announced the integration with Exasol after working on weekly projects, called Makeover Mondays and things started turning for the better.

But what is Exasol? Because Exasol is de-facto the fastest analytical database in the world. Speed is reached in the lab and in real life, no matter which cloud provider is used for test. In other words, it is redefining the meaning of a database, reaching 1000 times faster results than second best.

As of 2020, Exasol is a leader in 18 categories according to the recent BARC survey. Exasol won 4 most prestigious categories of performanceplatform reliabilitysupport quality, and recommendation. Customer are extremely satisfied related to any other data platform, with 100% of customers recommendation.

Time is money

Tableau quickly realized they no longer needed to tone down the number of data rows for faster analysis. They can now use all the data for near real-time results even if the users are working on hundreds of millions of records.

Companies need fast access to their data. The more complex the query sent to a database, the higher the quality of the results. But the time it takes for a database to put through complicated request processing can go on for hours or even days.

Exasol is compatible with all major analysis tool out there and delivers fast results for all and every analysis. It can be: customer data analysis, self-service business intelligence, success measurement, targeting specific groups or evaluating extensive data access.

Exasol & Tableau – Don’t shoot the messenger

Integrating Exasol with Tableau is easy and provides Tableau customers the power to visualize and analyze very large live data. Tableau has a native connector to Exasol which makes it easy for you to establish a connection.

Exasol’s live connection to Tableau allows users to use very large data sets. You will probably forget how much data you are working with because sub-second response times. Rapid rendering of visualizations take the focus away from performance questions and let you get on with your job.

Telekom Slovenije use Exasol to speed up Tableau

Telekom Slovenije

The Exasol analytical database more than fulfilled the expectations regarding the speed of advanced querying. This was demonstrated with by far the fastest generation of table extracts for analytical software Tableau that is used by data scientists and business users at Telekom Slovenije and derives insights that are presented via personalized dashboards.

Case Study: Telekom Slovenije

Ready for the next step?

Our team of experts is here to answer your questions and discuss how we can boost your operational efficiency by merging rich tradition with a progressive mindset.