Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B • Hacker News Board

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#331

Post by raphtheb » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 11:45 PM UTC

chasd00 wrote: post #123

this is a vote of no confidence for the Salesforce Einstein Analytics ( formally Wave analytics ) product. I suspect over the next couple years you'll see Einstein Analytics phased out in favor of Tableau with a SF stylesheet applied and framed inside Salesforce. On the other hand, the IOT team at SF probably loves this. I got to spend a few days with the main engineers discussing their "Thunder" architecture a coupl…

Hey! Glad you enjoyed what the IOT team was doing! I didn't think many people knew about us!

I was actually a part of that team and left Salesforce pretty recently. I think i can safely state that everyone involved in building the tech for that IOT product was pretty proud of what we built.

That being said, the team that built it 2-3 years back and the current team are fundamentally different. The department was thoroughly axed back around November 2017, and multiple teams, including my old one, were spun out into different other projects. It's a shame really, that project was what lured me into joining a behemoth like Salesforce in the first place.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#332

Post by bshoemaker » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 12:04 AM UTC

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…

If you have to write code for this stuff 90% of people won't be able to analyze things, and 90% of analyses won't happen because they won't be worth the time.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#333

Post by dustingetz » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 12:33 AM UTC

stewbrew wrote: post #232

dustingetz wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RDBMS = data silo

You make it sound as if this were a bad thing. RDBMS work well for many use cases. There are plenty of tools around to work with them. Good open source implementations exist.

Consider the case when you are a big company and have hundreds of them

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#334

Post by da_chicken » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 12:36 AM UTC

radicalbyte wrote: post #281

sequoia wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the problem space here genuinely complex in terms of business-complexity? Is there some better alternative that doesn't entail some other massive tradeoff such as managing your own servers, creating ingress mechanisms from multiple systems, building your own version of salesforce etc.? In short, is there any solution that "does everything you could possibly want" while ensuring you _never_ need to hire a data e…

Yes it is :) You have to normalize data taken from various sources of various age and complexity. So you really have to understand the data. You also have to really understand the questions. I've worked with (and on) lots of these tools and projects; the complexity is never in the frontend, it's dominated by getting the data, getting the data right and into the right format. If all you want in the end is a good looki…

This basically reads like, "You need to have a data engineer." Or half an engineer and half an analyst.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#335

Post by da_chicken » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 12:41 AM UTC

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 but to someone who is in to working directly with RDBMSs, Salesforce is 100% front end. It's like how CEs think C is high level, but web developers think C is low level.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#336

Post by sct202 » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 12:46 AM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #314

smrtinsert wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many business users are going to use Juypter notebooks? Meanwhile, someone with basic computing experience can create in-depth reports with Tableau in less than an hour.

SAS and R are pretty common business user tools that are basically the same thing as Juypter. Tableau is nice, but you generally need to use something else to prep data for it whether that's an ETL process IT sets up or something manual that an analyst publishes.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#337

Post by redstone08 » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 1:00 AM UTC

I think the value will be created from the data itself, less focus on data-processing skills. Of course, modeling skills will be still important at future, but data-processing would rather become much more easier. That's why self-bi tools like Tableau, Elastic search are becoming more and more popular.

I am personally focusing on Metatron Discovery, which is an Open-Sourced Big data analytics platform for citizen scientists. Link : https://github.com/metatron-app/metatron-discovery

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#338

Post by 1290cc » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 1:45 AM UTC

Very happy for the Tableau folks, they are great to work with!

My firm uses Informatica's IICS to output all of the datasets for Tableau to visualize, its not as exciting as the hundreds of frameworks and languages that do the same but it works reliably and I don't have to hire expensive data scientists to get the job done or switch tech every few years to whatever is the flavor of the month.

We take the 80/20 approach that most questions the business asks can be answered with Informatica. The last 20% we save for our developers and the odd data scientist to help us with.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#339

Post by shearskill » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 2:00 AM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #314

smrtinsert wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many business users are going to use Juypter notebooks? Meanwhile, someone with basic computing experience can create in-depth reports with Tableau in less than an hour.

Netflix uses Jupyter for data science quite heavily: https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/notebook-innovation-591e...

But that’s for data science which is (hopefully) the foundation of actionable BI.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#340

Post by new4thaccount » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 2:02 AM UTC

initself wrote: post #293

prepend wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tableau has a data etl tool called “Prep” that helps with this problem. But it only goes so far. But I think that’s where the problem truly requires a data engineer.

Exactly. Instead of ETL, start writing your own Perl and various logical, reusable components. Roll your own ETL, however you want it, in a terminal. So what, you have to learn vim, big deal! Mouse driven interfaces are a huge part of the dysfunction.

Yea I've been a little confused here until I realized I would just write some bash, Python, Perl...etc script where some would advocate for complicated tools.