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Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

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Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#241

Post by in9 »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #206
anonu wrote: post #164

One thing I've had to remind myself of - coming from a CS/Engineering background similar to most folks on HN (I'm guessing) - is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don't. To me, Salesforce looks like a big shared Excel file with a bunch of sheets. Tableau... well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server. To others, this tech is just magical. Pay the money, do th…

>is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don't. Is that fully accurate, though? Where does that leave data scientists / data analysts? I know SQL very well, and I know python's data stack (numpy, pandas, matplotlib, plotly, seaborn, various stats toolkits). I have a strong understanding of the "programming ecosystem" i.e. concepts, terms, definitions, and so on. I understand (basic) compu…

you are a programmer. At least in my book. You may not be experienced in architecting software projects, or writing highly maintainable code, or dealing with niche frameworks and tools (gui frameworks, network systems). But that is just a lack of training, interest, opportunity, etc...

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#242

Post by matchagaucho »

kfk wrote: post #141

So I have to deal with both tools at my company. The reality is that it all feels so incomplete from a BI standpoint. Managers are throwing money at front end tools like Salesforce and Tableau, but the entire back end stack is still pretty much the same as 20-30 years ago (big expensive Oracle-ish databases). I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things like Vega are much more interesting…

My Salesforce clients have increasingly been considering Tableau. Tableau has great out-of-box discoverability of geo fields, dimensions and facts. The ability to auto-suggest a map of the U.S. based on data containing City/State is "magic" to power users.

The only barriers to Salesforce + Tableau adoption I noticed were cross-object JOINs and live vs cached data extracts.

Both issues were remedied by denormalizing the data prior to export. For example, a nightly flattened "view" of Opportunities with key related objects moved into columns.

Mulesoft is well suited to perfect the ETL challenges. Bringing them to the table could be a win for everyone.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#243

Post by capkutay »

himlion wrote: post #187
fjsolwmv wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure your scripts and web server costs less than Tableau?

Yeah, Tableau is very expensive. Way more than a few weeks of dev time.

Ah of course. Just a few few weeks of dev time to build the same thing a multi-billion dollar company sells. Then after a few weeks of dev time you find out you're missing about 80% of the features that makes tableau useful. After that few weeks your manager asks you how the project is going and you just mutter something about how you should probably just buy looker or tableau.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#244

Post by cycrutchfield »

anonu wrote: post #164

One thing I've had to remind myself of - coming from a CS/Engineering background similar to most folks on HN (I'm guessing) - is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don't. To me, Salesforce looks like a big shared Excel file with a bunch of sheets. Tableau... well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server. To others, this tech is just magical. Pay the money, do th…

And this attitude right here perfectly exemplifies “NIH syndrome”. Beware if you work somewhere and a colleague suggests that some homegrown hacked-together non-feature-complete solution would be competitive and “cost less” than the professional product.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#246

Post by ZeroCool2u »

qwert-e wrote: post #161
kfk wrote: post #141

So I have to deal with both tools at my company. The reality is that it all feels so incomplete from a BI standpoint. Managers are throwing money at front end tools like Salesforce and Tableau, but the entire back end stack is still pretty much the same as 20-30 years ago (big expensive Oracle-ish databases). I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things like Vega are much more interesting…

> I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things like Vega are much more interesting. In that case you may be interested in Dash (dash.plot.ly). It’s a free and open source library that you can use to create dashboards online with Python only.

We love Dash on our team, anything more than a Tableau dashboard goes into Dash. You can basically just treat it as a Flask app.

We write our back ends with FastAPI[1], which is usually just a wrapper around our ML models. Then serve both Dash and FastAPI with gunicorn. The backend is provided the uvicorn[2] worker class with the gunicorn -k arg[3] to greatly increase the speed as well.

For personal projects you can use this stack in GCP's AppEngine standard environment to basically host your (relatively low traffic) apps for free.

1. https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/ 2. https://www.uvicorn.org/ 3. https://docs.gunicorn.org/en/stable/run.html#commonly-used-a...

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#247

Post by rmk2 »

soverance wrote: post #238
rmk2 wrote: post #194

Oh hey, maybe this will mean somebody at Tableau has to start to give a damn about enterprise features, such as a way to do product activation and registration that doesn't fail completely in non-persistent virtual desktop environments. Or Tableau can continue to pretend that this isn't a real issue and stonewall customers and partners alike. I think the actual visualisation part is neat, and better than many competi…

Yeah as the defacto Tableau Server administrator in my org, I am not happy with Tableau. Despite it's power and ability to let less-technical people generate insights from data, the administration experience as a whole is a total nightmare; purchasing/applying licensing to all installations is a disaster. Maintenance upgrades and backup procedures are also sort of wonky. For the data visualization piece, I personally…

I think Tableau Server works better on Linux, where upgrades etc. are also somewhat less painful and require less downtime.

That said, it baffles me why I have to restart Tableau Server 3 or 4 times during installation, and why I have to restart it for trivial changes more generally. For a piece of software that specifically ships with a cluster controller and full-blown zookeeper, somehow their engineers (or "engineers", as I sometimes get the impression) manage to make things that should be trivially solvable with reloads, partial restarts or spawning new workers (e.g. SSL certificates for the built-in Apache webserver) require a complete restart of the whole node.

edit: Regarding Power BI -- I feel that Tableau Server is (for better or worse) one of the killer features for many enterprise customers, because it means all of your data can remain within your own infrastructure and does not have to rely on external cloud providers. If that is not a requirement in your organisation, Power BI might make sense depending on your overall IT landscape, as well as your users' specific needs. On the other hand, if your organisation requires hosting things yourself, I guess it doesn't matter how miserable the experience is for you as an administrator. That's basically Tableau Server in a nutshell.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#248

Post by mateo411 »

Looker, Periscope, and Tableau have all been acquired or merged in the last six weeks. Periscope merged with another BI start up Sisense. Looker and Tableau were part of a multibillion dollar acquisitions. It's an interesting time for this space.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#250

Post by bhouston »

I was recruited for one of the first engineering positions at Tableau a very long time ago, but I turned it down as it just wasn't interesting enough. I think I was targetted in part because I was a SIGGRAPH presenter/author as one of the co-founders, Pat Hanrahan, was big into SIGGRAPH. Oh well.

It is a great success for a brilliant computer graphics professor: https://graphics.stanford.edu/~hanrahan/ http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/projects//polaris/

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