In this blog series we plan to feature some popular BI platforms, in the first of the two-part series we bring to you Tableau.
Tableau is a visualization tool with a focus on Business Intelligence. It is built on the Visual Query Language for Data, pioneered by tableau as VizQL™. VizQL™ is a technology that optimally converts the user’s drag and drop action into a database query and outputs the results visually in the form of data visualizations.
Analysis and visualization at the speed of thought
Another impressive technology of Tableau is its data engine capable of visually querying petabytes of data with billions of rows in mere seconds, or to put it more aptly, at the speed-of-thought. Combined with the drop and drop functionality, it enables users to follow their train of thought in analysing data. It also allows users to connect to a data source and obtain the visual analysis without any coding or scripting.
Connecting to data
Tableau allows users to connect to data in multiple ways. Using its powerful data engine, users can connect to multiple sources of data at once, connect live or take a snapshot of the databases to take advantage of its breakthrough in-memory architecture etc. The types of data sources that can be connected to Tableau can be found here.
Why Tableau?
Tableau has been the industry leader in Business Intelligence products and solutions for the past two years. Each year, Gartner analyses every vendor in the Business Intelligence and Analytics market. Their research has particular significance because it often identifies the innovations that drive the market. As part of that report, Gartner also releases the Magic Quadrant, which shows the relative positions of the market’s competitors.
Tableau has once again been recognized as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for 2014.
Product Offerings
Tableau offers three types of products namely, the Public, Personal and Professional Edition. The Public Edition is a free edition that allows workbooks and dashboards to be published ONLY to Tableau’s public website. The personal edition, while allowing workbooks to be saved locally, does not have the ability to connect to databases. The Professional edition is the full-fledged product from Tableau.
Part 1 ends here