Live data from Hacker News

Tableau stock down almost 50%

google.com

221–230 of 370 posts

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#221
post #90

Tableau is a good product. I use it daily. There simply is no better alternative for quick ad-hoc, enterprise-level, intuitive graph and dashboard making. I've been at large orgs where we evaluated all the cloud services like Mixpanel and the ilk, but they are very different use cases. Tableau + Redshift (or Vertica but Redshift is way less expensive) is the typical BI tech stack. When I go a client or a new job and…

Just to offer a different opinion: I know a lot of people who have been switching away from Tableau or not choosing it and using a different solution (or multiple) instead

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#222
post #90

Tableau is a good product. I use it daily. There simply is no better alternative for quick ad-hoc, enterprise-level, intuitive graph and dashboard making. I've been at large orgs where we evaluated all the cloud services like Mixpanel and the ilk, but they are very different use cases. Tableau + Redshift (or Vertica but Redshift is way less expensive) is the typical BI tech stack. When I go a client or a new job and…

Just to offer a different opinion: I know a lot of people who have been switching away from Tableau or not choosing it and using a different solution (or multiple) instead

I evaluated 15 different similar solutions and trying to settle on one. Curious as to what your friends are switching to.

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#223
post #79
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tableau is a surprisingly good desktop application for business intelligence and analytics that, IMO, grew too big for its own good. You plug it into data (spreadsheets, databases, you name it) and it makes it very simple (drag-and-drop simple) to crunch some numbers and produce interesting graphs, visualizations and analysis. Some clever stuff they had was (early-RoR-style) guessing of data semantics based on heuris…

Nail on the head regarding either selling a lot cheap, or little at high price. They went for the latter as you mention. I manage software licenses at my employer, and have been put off the price of Tableau, and the inflexibility they have. We're a consulting house, and mostly use Qlik. We started using Tableau last year. The problem for us is that as a consulting house, our staff turnover rate is high (as expected I…

Do you use Tableau for creating dashboards or more exploratory data analysis/visualization?

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A recent client of mine dealt with this by buying dedicated laptops to run Tableau on, when you needed to use it you just tracked down one of them. Seems like there should be a rule of thumb around this--software licenses should not be so expensive or inflexible that it's cheaper to buy a dedicated $1000 piece of shareable hardware than to get one for each user.

Interesting approach! How practical is it though? I can export a tbwx or whatever the extension is, so that those who need the dashboards can use Tableau Reader. I'm however wondering if such model would work for us. The one thing that I like about Tableau is that its documents are XML, which plays nice with git.

Aren't their data extracts (TDEs) binary files?

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A recent client of mine dealt with this by buying dedicated laptops to run Tableau on, when you needed to use it you just tracked down one of them. Seems like there should be a rule of thumb around this--software licenses should not be so expensive or inflexible that it's cheaper to buy a dedicated $1000 piece of shareable hardware than to get one for each user.

What keeps you from running Tableau in a VM that any number of people can open independently?

I'm pretty sure that's against their license terms.

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#226
post #90

Tableau is a good product. I use it daily. There simply is no better alternative for quick ad-hoc, enterprise-level, intuitive graph and dashboard making. I've been at large orgs where we evaluated all the cloud services like Mixpanel and the ilk, but they are very different use cases. Tableau + Redshift (or Vertica but Redshift is way less expensive) is the typical BI tech stack. When I go a client or a new job and…

Tableau is not scriptable. 3 places I have worked are moving away from it because of this severe limitation. You have no control over what queries it writes and you can't easily add simple scripts to make things more seamless or performant, like say a quick scripted query to populate a dropdown menu.

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#227
post #90

Tableau is a good product. I use it daily. There simply is no better alternative for quick ad-hoc, enterprise-level, intuitive graph and dashboard making. I've been at large orgs where we evaluated all the cloud services like Mixpanel and the ilk, but they are very different use cases. Tableau + Redshift (or Vertica but Redshift is way less expensive) is the typical BI tech stack. When I go a client or a new job and…

Asking out of curiosity: What does Tableau offer that I can not quickly set up in either Mondrian coupled with a frontend like Saiku or Pentaho or eg. R and a Shiny server?

I don't think enough people have tried Shiny. It is fantastic and super easy. People really assume it is very difficult to get a grasp of.

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#228
post #90

Tableau is a good product. I use it daily. There simply is no better alternative for quick ad-hoc, enterprise-level, intuitive graph and dashboard making. I've been at large orgs where we evaluated all the cloud services like Mixpanel and the ilk, but they are very different use cases. Tableau + Redshift (or Vertica but Redshift is way less expensive) is the typical BI tech stack. When I go a client or a new job and…

Tableau is not scriptable. 3 places I have worked are moving away from it because of this severe limitation. You have no control over what queries it writes and you can't easily add simple scripts to make things more seamless or performant, like say a quick scripted query to populate a dropdown menu.

I've played with Tableau, is there no scripting at all? Their previous Director of Analytic Product Management Stephen McDaniel stated that in v8 they were going to add server side Javascript - and he said this in 2012...

https://community.tableau.com/ideas/1694#comment-2661

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#229
post #90

Tableau is a good product. I use it daily. There simply is no better alternative for quick ad-hoc, enterprise-level, intuitive graph and dashboard making. I've been at large orgs where we evaluated all the cloud services like Mixpanel and the ilk, but they are very different use cases. Tableau + Redshift (or Vertica but Redshift is way less expensive) is the typical BI tech stack. When I go a client or a new job and…

We used Tableau for about a year and then decided to drop them. The reason was a sudden change in licensing terms where: 1. The minimum step increase in server cores changed. 2. The cost to run ha increased. 3. The cost per core increased.

The only thing that is worse than an expensive product, is one that has unpredictable pricing.

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#230
post #90

Tableau is a good product. I use it daily. There simply is no better alternative for quick ad-hoc, enterprise-level, intuitive graph and dashboard making. I've been at large orgs where we evaluated all the cloud services like Mixpanel and the ilk, but they are very different use cases. Tableau + Redshift (or Vertica but Redshift is way less expensive) is the typical BI tech stack. When I go a client or a new job and…

Tableau is not scriptable. 3 places I have worked are moving away from it because of this severe limitation. You have no control over what queries it writes and you can't easily add simple scripts to make things more seamless or performant, like say a quick scripted query to populate a dropdown menu.

It's not very scriptable but that's not the use case of Tableau. Generally data analysts do not know how to program. They meet with PMs to understand concerns, interpret concerns into metrics, write some SQL, and display them in dashboards.

While Tableau performance is a thing that people debate, its a non-issue. Generally, the data analyst produces a report that is consumed by 1-10 people and if that consumption grows >10, then the organization will "productize" the report by putting engineering resources on it and build something custom with HighCharts or D3.

Post reply on HN