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Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

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Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#271

Post by jdgoesmarching »

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…

Expensive data engineer here, I see nothing wrong with this >:)

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#272

Post by shmooth »

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.

I played with Denodo (data virtualization software) a couple years ago and thought it was pretty legit.

In theory, it could be used to provide that industrial strength abstraction layer between your Tableau/Looker/etc. and your bajillion weird and not-so-weird (RDBMS) data sources.

That would seem to make sense to me from the point of view of -- I would want my data visualization/analytics-type company to be able to concentrate on data visualization/analytics, not building some insane and never-ending data abstraction layer.

The part that surprised me was that Denodo could allegedly do a lot of smart data caching, thus speeding things up (esp hadoop-oriented data sources) and keeping costs down.

I'm guessing the other data virtualization providers can do similar.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#273

Post by scarejunba »

dvdhsu wrote: post #261
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…

As an engineer, this has really fascinated me. Tableau, Salesforce, Excel, etc. were things that never made a significant amount of sense to me. I thought mostly of Salesforce as a CRUD app (which it is!), Tableau as d3 with nicer ergonomics, and Excel as... well... something I never understood. If this is something you guys are interested in, I started a company called Retool ( https://tryretool.com ) that is essent…

When I looked into this a few months ago, your pricing didn’t make sense to me. You’re saving developer time, but charging on user time. So I’ve got 800 people in this org and I could either pay a shit ton to use retool or just build it from scratch. The difference between both of these is my time so it makes sense I’d pay you for that.

That made it not viable for me. Building from scratch was way cheaper with Upwork. Anyway, Product was cool.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#274

Post by lstroud »

pea wrote: post #268
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…

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.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#275

Post by sequoia »

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…

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 engineer? This is a holy grail that I don't think exists.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#276

Post by jtwaleson »

luckydata wrote: post #263
dvdhsu wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineer, this has really fascinated me. Tableau, Salesforce, Excel, etc. were things that never made a significant amount of sense to me. I thought mostly of Salesforce as a CRUD app (which it is!), Tableau as d3 with nicer ergonomics, and Excel as... well... something I never understood. If this is something you guys are interested in, I started a company called Retool ( https://tryretool.com ) that is essent…

so you're rebuilding Visual Basic in react.

Do you mean that as a good or a bad thing? VB was fantastic to many people!

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#277

Post by hello_moto »

sixdimensional wrote: post #70
cl42 wrote: post #17

I love this. Mulesoft, Tableau -- there's a very clear strategy here for Salesforce. You're running all of your customer-facing operations on Salesforce, so why not also integrate the BI stack into everything? I've worked with a lot of companies who spend months (if not years) integrating their data into a few disparate systems... The finance team has one system (and underlying data lake), the commerce team another,…

If Salesforce wants to run my entire underlying data infrastructure, I think we’re in trouble. I see this more of a land grab, with SaaS vendors trying to push their own BI stacks and create an even tighter era of lock-in. I don’t think it is necessarily a good thing. Data is an asset and liability - when somebody else has all of yours in their proprietary platform and under the control of their cloud, that is a scar…

On the flip side, if Salesforce does not own its own BI stack, their customer might go to a different vendor that has better integration (i.e.: Microsoft PowerBI).

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#279

Post by Jach »

victor106 wrote: post #58
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…

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 did some integration work with the venerable Pentaho project some years ago. It's got both an Enterprise edition and a Community edition that's open source with tools including ETL and more. https://wiki.pentaho.com/ looks like the best place to start these days.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#280

Post by acomjean »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #200
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…

What is Vega? I only found the genome browser tool, unless that is what you're referring to?

Its a javascript graphing library. We've started using it at work a bit for our online dynamic graphs. Its a graphic grammar on top of the d3 js library.

We seem to prefer the lite version, which is simplier.

If you look at the examples, you can click a button a go to a dynamic editor which we rather like.[1]

https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/

If JS and web browsers aren't your thing, they have python version called "altair"

https://altair-viz.github.io

[1]https://vega.github.io/editor/#/examples/vega-lite/stacked_b...

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