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

21–30 of 128 posts

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#21

Post by nomilk »

pinewurst wrote: post #4

I’m not sure this is totally on Salesforce as the Tableau product has gotten so sluggish and inflexible. At my last job I started dumping data from Tableau to CSV (don’t get me started on the crap CSVs that Tableau generates) and importing to R for analysis. Good riddance.

I don't use Tableau but had similar feelings recently with Databricks. Tools like these are probably fine for folks who want more grunt than a laptop without needing to learn much about cloud, infrastructure or security. But for me, it feels like a straight jacket. It lets you get going quickly but at the expense of flexibility. Slowly but surely the warts become apparent.

A year or two really isn't a lot of time (for an individual nor company) to invest in order to build long term skills in powerful tools that side step inflexible (and expensive) platforms.

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#22

Post by KingOfCoders »

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…

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 is every marketing person knows Tableau and with a self explaining table structure (e.g. DBT on top of BigQuery) is self serving.

The only good thing with Looker is their data journeys, which Tableau doesn't have.

The worst (for EU/GDPR at least) feature of Looker is how people can send emails from a query (circumventing corporate email infrastructure, blacklists, data protection etc.). Can you say "Intern sends spam mail to millions of customers because they thought this was a good idea".

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#23

Post by petepete »

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 try to avoid these tools wherever possible, given the choice I'd always go for tools like Blazer.

https://github.com/ankane/blazer

No such luck in my current role, Looker and PowerBI are both in use by different bits of the org and nobody has the ability to delve into the underlying figures.

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#24

Post by oxfordmale »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #22
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…

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…

I am not recommending Looker either, but data extract stored on the server? That is a last-century solution. We often hit data limits in Tableau online as colleagues get overzealous.

Beyond that, it is also a major GDPR headache in Europe. If someone uses their personal account, with elevated access, you suddenly have a data extract on the Tableau Online server that contains personal data, with no way to enforce retention periods.

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#25

Post by WhrRTheBaboons »

petepete wrote: post #23
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 try to avoid these tools wherever possible, given the choice I'd always go for tools like Blazer. https://github.com/ankane/blazer No such luck in my current role, Looker and PowerBI are both in use by different bits of the org and nobody has the ability to delve into the underlying figures.

Blazer sounds cool, thanks for the link!

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#26

Post by 3abiton »

wenc wrote: post #13

I've been using Tableau since 2013 to deploy dashboards, which in my case are front ends to ML model output. (for me, I used it as a Streamlit before Streamlit existed) People think of Tableau as a dashboard tool, which it is. But it's also a great tool for doing EDA (exploratory data analysis) on multidimensional data. Instead of writing lots of seaborn/ggplot code (and having to remember the syntax), you can just m…

But there are decent OSS alternatives that can rival it's functionality, so why go with Tableau and it's baggage?

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#27

Post by fifilura »

My limited experience with Tableau is that it felt like Excel on speed. And heavily burdened by legacy (just like Excel or any Microsoft product is by the way).

While what we wanted was something that was SQL-native.

Back in the days we opted for a tool called Chartio which was later engulfed by Atlassian/Jira. Not sure what happened to it after, but it suited our purpose fine enough. Just line-charts and easily editable SQL.

I have some experience with Superset, but it was not really built for customer facing dashboards. Mainly useful for internal use.

Blazer as someone else posted sounds interesting. May check it out.

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#28

Post by CSMastermind »

leetrout wrote: post #5
MissTake wrote: post #2

Our renewal got Shanghaied by an extremely greedy and over zealous sales rep who injected himself between us and our renewals reps, and wanted to turn a sub $80k renewal into damn near $200k this year and $300k next. Needless to say it got nowhere fast and, by the time he gave up and threw us “back” to renewals, the damage had been done. We elected to do what they thought was unthinkable and we just walked away. My o…

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.

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#29

Post by Anon_Admirer »

There seems to be a lot of shade here at Power BI. Forgetting Microsoft’s dominance in the market, I’ve much appreciated Microsoft’s approach to data visualization which is soft on the visuals, but gradually improving them and hard on the programming aspects, such as Power Query or “M” and Data Analysis Expressions (“DAX”). The former they have opened to anyone to create via Power BI visuals SDK.

The reason I say this is because something that would take me hours to do in Tableau maybe only take a few minutes with Power BI’s mashup language (Power Query) and the Functional Language DAX. The ability to create temporary tables on the fly and utilize variables and the hundreds of other things you can do with DAX to create complex measures, calculated columns, etc. feels empowering. Most people I’ve spoken to who’ve gone away from Tableau to Power BI and used it long enough start to really appreciate it for the vast capabilities.

Additionally, the latest Power BI visual calculations feature released has made the learning curve a lot shorter for those newer to DAX and all our lives much easier.

On the visuals side there has been a lot of entrepreneurship to create custom visuals with the SDK to do a lot of visuals that just weren’t available in Tableau. So many that I have a hard time going back to Tableau because its missing a visual I need.

Lastly, not many talk about the fact the IT loves it in that its got so many capabilities for providing data governance and security through its various features.

Update and one final thought: there is some genius to me in how Microsoft seemed to have created an abstraction that allows the platform to grow independently and greatly on so many fronts - DAX with new functions and features, the Power BI Visuals and their SDK to do more and keep in with user interface changes, and their BI model approach (which now allows GIT versioning with readability changes).

Re: Is Tableau Dead?

#30

Post by rndmswethrwawy »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #11
MissTake wrote: post #2

Our renewal got Shanghaied by an extremely greedy and over zealous sales rep who injected himself between us and our renewals reps, and wanted to turn a sub $80k renewal into damn near $200k this year and $300k next. Needless to say it got nowhere fast and, by the time he gave up and threw us “back” to renewals, the damage had been done. We elected to do what they thought was unthinkable and we just walked away. My o…

One can safely assume Salesforce has very well made internal Tableau visualizations of Salepserson performance. That sort of failure would almost certainly show up with crisp drop shadows. It is a shame, however, that the behavior of the sales rep probably made the renewals rep's chart look bad if not worse.

They could have, but I can promise you that if they have Tableau visualizations _at all_ at this point, they're shit.

Letting something "die on the vine" is the only way to describe Salesforce's Tableau acquisition.

Post reply on HN