Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Tableau Dead?

mergeyourdata.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 128 posts

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#111

Post by data-ottawa »

cpsempek wrote: post #81
oxfordmale wrote: post #20

I hate Tableau with a passion. The main bugbear is that viewers can't see the SQL code the dashboards execute. I am no fan of Looker, but the "Explore here" allows other users to see the SQL and tweak it if needed. Most intermediate data stakeholders are confident enough to modify the where clause to suit their custom needs, allowing them to self-serve. The licensing costs are prohibitive, too. It is almost unafforda…

I also hate Tableau for this reason. However, it's a bad pattern to be storing custom SQL in a BI tool IMO. Better to create tables or views which hold your report logic and are stored in git. That way you're decoupling defining metrics and business logic from your BI tool, making that information queryable in your warehouse by users or other tools (and easily viewable!).

It's a best practice yes, but in practice when you produce any data mart you end up getting questions to power deep dives and that's where custom SQL ends up coming from. There's usually a right way to answer the question, and a fast way with custom SQL, and with ad-hocs the fast way wins every time.

Here's an example, you do a customers rollup and an orders rollup, but a user asks for average order value of return customers buying product X. In SQL, that's a semi join of order line items, on your orders table and an inner join on daily customers to determine if they're a new customer. But no BI tool I've ever used has semi joins, so when you join in the tool your order values are multiplied and you're back to custom SQL to fix it.

It's that or build a whole new mart to answer this one question.

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#112

Post by dswalter »

aaronharnly wrote: post #51
KingOfCoders wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looker is obscenely expensive compared to Tableau. Also the UI is bad. The caching of Tableau is a huge money safer and huge performance boost if you e.g. use it with BigQuery (cut our BG costs by 80%). As with every data tool, you need strong data governance, or everyone will define their own metric for revenue and then you have endless discussions about "why the data is wrong" (it isn't). The biggest benefit to me…

We use both Looker and Tableau. It’s astonishing to me how Looker has stagnated since being acquired by Google. It’s really moribund.

Before they were acquired by Google, looker had a bunch of really engaged community support people, and the docs were great for what the product did. There were learning paths for different types of users and tutorials linked to references in a way that made sense. I learned a lot about effective documentation (and looker!) from going through what they had.

Google laid off their US-based community support team (https://www.reddit.com/r/Looker/comments/t5jpwk/google_cloud...) and in the time since, those docs links have rotted/disconnected.

Even if 100 US-based community support folks were making $300K in total comp, why would you not spend $30MM to keep your $2.6B acquisition humming along? A bit mystifying.

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#113

Post by silent_cal »

jherskovic wrote: post #84

I was a big Tableau champion at our org. Lots of dashboards, led a user group, was the go-to expert for a while (think 10 years ago). For us, what killed it was the pricing. They got very greedy very fast. Justifying a 4-digit license, per desktop, was the real killer. We just couldn’t, so the creation of dashboards became a tool of a “priesthood” of sorts. Everyone loved the way the dashboards looked and performed,…

Went down a similar path, but d3 is way too hard. I think we used chart.js?

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#114

Post by rawgabbit »

kozikow wrote: post #67

I'm currently doing BI evaluation for improvement of the current toolkit, so I might use this comment section for some BI experts' advice. We mostly use Looker Studio + Metabase currently. Investigating Tableau, Looker, PowerBI, Sisense, Omni currently. PowerBI is great, but BigQuery integration seems to be lagging. Is there a way to get such a tool without paying $50K a year? Everything so far is only a "nice to hav…

Snowflake purchased Streamlit. When Snowflake has all the kinks worked out, I would create Streamlit applications directly in Snowflake and be done with it.

https://docs.snowflake.com/en/developer-guide/streamlit/limi...

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#116

Post by data-ottawa »

te_chris wrote: post #71
oxfordmale wrote: post #20

I hate Tableau with a passion. The main bugbear is that viewers can't see the SQL code the dashboards execute. I am no fan of Looker, but the "Explore here" allows other users to see the SQL and tweak it if needed. Most intermediate data stakeholders are confident enough to modify the where clause to suit their custom needs, allowing them to self-serve. The licensing costs are prohibitive, too. It is almost unafforda…

I really like mode. It strikes a decent balance between being sql/notebook first but also has the memory engine for diving into things by non-tech.

My problem with Mode is you often end up with a ton of copy and pasted SQL and no visibility or capability of changing it with updates in the underlying data. It really hurts data governance over the long run.

I like the notebooks feature, the integration of output cells with reports is so so, but it's the best balance between exploratory and reporting tool I've seen.

I found the parameterized code powerful but creating a basic report with lots of filters and a few parameters was very slow.

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#117

Post by swat535 »

CSMastermind wrote: post #28
leetrout wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is about to be us with Heroku. Feels like software sales has just gotten worse for years now.

Heroku is one of those things that if someone tells me their still on it without a plan to migrate I question the executive leadership at their company. Shade of its former self, expensive, and there are plenty of better options. Really seems like the company is in zombie mode until it's eventual slow demise.

What better alternatives are there?

I saw Fly.io and it doesn't even offer a managed database, not to mention the fact that they have had serious reliability issues.

Heroku is pretty battle tested and mature at this point, though the feature development has stopped, I don't doubt Salesforce is now going to use it simply as a the "cloud" offering for their other products..

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#118

Post by j45 »

jherskovic wrote: post #84

I was a big Tableau champion at our org. Lots of dashboards, led a user group, was the go-to expert for a while (think 10 years ago). For us, what killed it was the pricing. They got very greedy very fast. Justifying a 4-digit license, per desktop, was the real killer. We just couldn’t, so the creation of dashboards became a tool of a “priesthood” of sorts. Everyone loved the way the dashboards looked and performed,…

PowerBI started small and developed quickly.

Microsoft like any software company will raise prices on their tools similar to tableau or oracle in the past.

Microsoft uniquely has a large portion of the fortune 100-500 as customers. They have already had that market from office, m365, etc and will grow those things.

Microsoft is relatively early in the licensing lifecycle arc for cloud.

This will happen relative to the maturity of offering, uptake/demand to pricing.

Some of this can already be seen with the Business central pricing.

Again, the above is not to single Microsoft out. Only that their products are relatively young but developing extremely quickly and the execution of the pricing models will be relative to a lot of things like demand, and stock prices.

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#119

Post by [deleted] »

dsaavy wrote: post #90
codeulike wrote: post #57

The five stages of grief Denial: " Tableau will become a tool in the Salesforce toolbox that major players will continue to use. " Anger: " Salesforce executives mentioning Tableau less than Slack or Mulesoft on their public calls ... Meanwhile, Microsoft's Power BI is on a hot streak. " Bargaining: " I believe it'll be a consistent player at large institutions who typically go through complex project and procurement…

Haha this is spot on.

[deleted]

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#120

Post by ianburrell »

anon84873628 wrote: post #98
aaronharnly wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use both Looker and Tableau. It’s astonishing to me how Looker has stagnated since being acquired by Google. It’s really moribund.

One wonders why Google bothers acquiring companies if it's impossible to integrate them into the monolith.

I think they should keep acquisitions under Alphabet and separate from Google. What is the point of having umbrella corporation if not going to use it?
Post reply on HN