Organizations who choose to accelerate their Tableau dashboards with Incorta can perform direct queries against 100s of millions of records with sub-second performance. With this integration, data can easily be brought together from multiple data sources without the need to do complex data modeling first. Additionally, Incorta can simplify the development of Tableau dashboards, by offering a semantic layer in Incorta (called business views). These business views can contain human readable fields and complex business formulas that abstract away the complexities of the underlying data.
Many of Incorta's customers choose to power their Tableau dashboards with Incorta's extremely performant data platform. To maximize performance and avoid as many configuration headaches as possible, there are a few best practices that should always be followed that are outlined below:
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Design business schema with one view for a Tableau Report. Each Tableau visualization should be built against a single Incorta business view. With this approach joins do not have to be defined (again) in Tableau. And why would you want to define them in Tableau since they are already defined in Incorta? When designing your business views, do not use analyzer views as they have performance limitations.
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Every Incorta business view used by Tableau should have a base table defined. This enforces a well-understood "record grain" to the Incorta view such that it cannot change as different fields within the business view are used on the Tableau dashboard.
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Every Incorta business view used by Tableau should generate valid SQL. From the Analyzer, create a simple listing table based on each business view and then click the SQL icon in the upper right corner to view the SQL that is generated. If the SQL does not generate, the business view will not work in Tableau. Starting with Incorta release 2024.1, Incorta validates business views for compatibility with external BI tools, like Tableau, and SQL compliance. You can easily identify a verified business view by the green circle with a tick mark displayed next to it in the Business Schema Designer.
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Set up User Impersonation if using Tableau Server. In order to enable record level security through Tableau, you must first define record level security in Incorta. Tableau Server will connect to Incorta using a "service user" account, but will also send the Tableau Server "user" info to Incorta so that Incorta can apply row level security before sending the response back.
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Define your formulas in Incorta, not in Tableau. Take advantage of Incorta's lightning fast in-memory DDM analytics and push all the formulas to Incorta. They will be much slower if rendered on the Tableau side.
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Configure Incorta to use a higher value for “Max Groups” in the Incorta CMC. The default is 1M, but this should be increased to 5M or 10M. Be careful though. If set too high this can have a negative affect on Incorta system performance.
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Avoid creating visualizations in Tableau which download thousands of records. If you add a table visualization in Tableau which is fetching thousands of records, unlike Incorta, Tableau will download all records and will take time to download and then render data in the sheet. Please add a default filter for the Tableau table visualization to limit number of records downloaded.
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Make sure to use the Incorta SQL port instead of the Spark fallback port as performance is better when using the Incorta engine and you can trust that the results will be correct.
References:
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