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Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

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Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#321

Post by samstave »

kfk wrote: post #159
remus wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the entire back end stack is still pretty much the same as 20-30 years ago (big expensive Oracle-ish databases). Other than the expensive part, is it really such a bad thing? I feel like relational databases are a pretty good fit for a wide set of use cases and have a huge amount of tooling.

The businesses are coming with requests that require complex SQL on millions of records of data that normally is sitting in various sources (warehouse, salesforce, etc.). Unless you hire expensive data engineers, you can't do this type of work reliably. You can stick things together with expensive GUI oriented prep tools like Alteryx, but you pay in reliability and, quite frankly, sleep. And forget IT, IT is so stuck…

Fuck Tableau... they obfuscate everything.

LOOKER is 1,000 times better UI/UX

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#322

Post by ericd »

lstroud wrote: post #274
pea wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey - I'm hacking on a product which allows you to build interactive browser-based apps/dashboards from Python and dataset blocks. You can return altair (vega) plots from your Python and they'll get rendered in the app, and we're just adding the ability to import existing Jupyter notebooks this week. It's still really early, but feel free to have a play and create an app. Here is an example app examining using the Pr…

I can relate. The sales pitch is still “so easy anyone can do it”. As a result, corporate money is thrown after tools that enable business folks to build dashboards...which isn’t a good use of their time. :). In truth, they need good data folks working with them. I guess that doesn’t make for a sexy product sales pitch.

I think the counterargument is that it's not a good use of their time to convince someone to build it for them, when they can finally do it themselves in half the time :-)

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#323

Post by aheilbut »

smrtinsert wrote: post #240
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…

When I look at Jupyter notebooks, I ask myself why is anyone bother with ootb reporting tools or growing their own? Jupyter notebooks are the right mix of customizable and self-documenting.

The kinds of analysis and visualizations you can build in 5 minutes with Tableau (and the ability to explore the space of possible analyses and visualizations) would take hours of futzing to reproduce with python.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#324

Post by samstave »

jonloyens wrote: post #309

I'm the CPO at a SaaS data catalog and analysis hub company called data.world - I was at the Snowflake Summit when the Looker acquisition by Google was announced - the guys at their booth seemed pretty happy ;) With Google snapping up Looker ($2.6B) for Google Cloud, Salesforce's much bigger purchase of Tableau is a clear sign that the big guys see buying BI tools is a good way to expand the reach of their offerings…

Looker is way better than tableau.

Lets break it down:

Both are over priced

Lookeer, however has LookerML

Tableau obfuscates all code.

Looker has easier bolt-ons to redshift/postgres

Tableau's BI tool-set is weaker than looker, albeit, wider spread (more mature)

So, I think google got a steal and SF is playing catch-up... at a high cost.

Plus SF's sunk costs in eveything is going to make a 15B buy take at least two decades to pay off....

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#325

Post by dmor »

breck wrote: post #140
victor106 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly what we’ve been looking for. An open source ETL tool. This looks great. Will check it out for sure. Keep up the great work. I wonder if there are any other open source tools in this space?

I'm building one called Ohayo: https://github.com/breck7/ohayo It is still beta but should be ready to go in weeks. Here's an example of the top 100 stories on Hacker News: https://ohayo.computer?filename=help-for-hackernews.top.flow...

Would love to see if we can collaborate. Can you drop me a note danielle@gitlab.com?

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#326

Post by ineedasername »

initself wrote: post #294
ineedasername wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interpreted that as front end to a database.

It's really a whole working methodology that includes an Object model, which one would call backend. Did I mention its a nasty fugly POS?

Yeah, it's certainly more than just a CRUD, and I agree it's awful. I never had to use it in the early years, so I don't know if it's that their original platform was poorly made, or that the accumulation of bloat & bolt-ons is what has made it this way.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#327

Post by dmor »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #182
dmor wrote: post #30

Wow, Looker last week and now Tableau. I’m only 90 days in to running the open source equivalent inside GitLab, and these big revenue multiples are telling a fascinating story. I would’ve loved to be a fly on the wall for this negotiation, what a great outcome for Tableau shareholders! With all that’s happening we’re definitely looking to pick up the pace, and would love to work with more contributors on the free ope…

Funny coincidence: I was reading about you in relation to Mattermark, then found your blog post on Meltano, and now I find your comment on HN. You're everywhere! :) Would it be possible to chat with you about your past experience at Mattermark? I am trying to answer a few questions (not related to the company, but related to VCs and investing). If so, my HN username @ gmail. Thanks!

Of course! Dropping you a note now

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#328

Post by bllguo »

greenyoda wrote: post #191
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…

> I can do the same thing with some scripts... I thought that the point of Tableau was to provide a tool that end-users (who can't program) could use to interactively explore their data. That's not something you can replicate with a bunch of scripts.

I can see how Tableau would be great if you are in a situation where you can have business guys creating their dashboards and exploring their data.

The issue in practice is almost always getting the data in a workable state so that you can manipulate it easily in Tableau. In my experience in smaller and mid-sized places, Tableau tasks get punted to analytics and data science, because they are needed anyway to get and transform the data in the first place. And these people usually prefer and are capable of using more technical tools than Tableau. I know I would rather use Shiny or Dash.

Maybe that's not a difficult problem in larger corps.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#329

Post by oarabbus_ »

therein wrote: post #283
oarabbus_ wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server. That's a massive waste of your time and effort. The maintenance costs become massive as well should you choose to create your own system. At the VERY least you should leverage existing free open-source tools such as Metabase or Superset or Dash, or free tools such as Google Data Studio or Mode Analytics, if you're not going to spend cash to get…

Out of genuine interest and perhaps even a need for such a solution, is there anything that does what Metabase/Superset/Dash/GDS/ModeAnalytics does but for realtime datastreams? For instance, parsing and recording and visualizing the events coming from a websockets or some event queue/bus?

Ah yes like the other user mentioned AWS Kinesis Firehose and GCP Pub/Sub may fit the bill as well

Grafana/Kibana are the actual charting tools

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#330

Post by breck »

dmor wrote: post #325
breck wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm building one called Ohayo: https://github.com/breck7/ohayo It is still beta but should be ready to go in weeks. Here's an example of the top 100 stories on Hacker News: https://ohayo.computer?filename=help-for-hackernews.top.flow...

Would love to see if we can collaborate. Can you drop me a note danielle@gitlab.com?

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