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Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

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Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#361

Post by kfk »

shmooth wrote: post #272
stewbrew wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have had to work with the Denodo for the past 1+ year, a total nightmare. Data virtualization is a "good in theory" concept but "doesn't work in practice" reality. Going back to the original sources for each query doesn't work, it will always be slower than using a proper analytics data warehouse. Caching doesn't help because at that point you can just do ETL. Also Denodo itself is full of weird behaviors and bugs, my team collectively decided it's worth the most hate of all the "enterprise" tools we use. One thing Denodo is good for is as an "access layer", but then maybe PrestoDB would be worth a shot or maybe even just a sqlalchemy and python.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#362

Post by dodobirdlord »

jjeaff wrote: post #360
rqmedes wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem space (Business) is not complex, its incredibly simple. Unfortunately the design patterns we use and the tooling is flawed. It has been this way for at least 25 years and the RDBMS, languages, design patterns, and architectures ( 2-tier/ 3-tier) are the cause. They make it simple to get started and even without knowing what you are doing you can easily churn out something that works if it is simple, doesn…

I feel like you are coming from an alternate universe. Nosql is the quick and easy thing to start with, then your needs become more and more complex and nosql just won't cut it anymore. Sure, nosql can scale and perform, but only if your needs are very specific and simple. There are no major systems out there of even moderate complexity that aren't built on an rdbms.

> There are no major systems out there of even moderate complexity that aren't built on an rdbms.

I don't think this claim is accurate.

https://www.dynamodbguide.com/the-dynamo-paper/

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#363

Post by test1235 »

olivermarks wrote: post #6
te_chris wrote: post #2

Leave it to Salesforce to buy the clunky incumbent, not Periscope

They are arguably essentially buying revenue to help their bottom line. Salesforce hopes to add $350-400M to their FY20 revenue

I don't know much about company account structures and finance dynamics, but that doesn't sound like much compared to the $15.7bn price?

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#364

Post by rqmedes »

jjeaff wrote: post #360
rqmedes wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem space (Business) is not complex, its incredibly simple. Unfortunately the design patterns we use and the tooling is flawed. It has been this way for at least 25 years and the RDBMS, languages, design patterns, and architectures ( 2-tier/ 3-tier) are the cause. They make it simple to get started and even without knowing what you are doing you can easily churn out something that works if it is simple, doesn…

I feel like you are coming from an alternate universe. Nosql is the quick and easy thing to start with, then your needs become more and more complex and nosql just won't cut it anymore. Sure, nosql can scale and perform, but only if your needs are very specific and simple. There are no major systems out there of even moderate complexity that aren't built on an rdbms.

Sorry I didn't explain it clearly. RDBMS are the reason we write business applications the way we do now. They are the root cause, swapping out RDBMS with NOSQL will solve nothing, because our languages, architectures, patterns, and libraries, how we even think about solving these problems all evolved on top of this and are flawed

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#365

Post by rqmedes »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #362
jjeaff wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you are coming from an alternate universe. Nosql is the quick and easy thing to start with, then your needs become more and more complex and nosql just won't cut it anymore. Sure, nosql can scale and perform, but only if your needs are very specific and simple. There are no major systems out there of even moderate complexity that aren't built on an rdbms.

> There are no major systems out there of even moderate complexity that aren't built on an rdbms. I don't think this claim is accurate. https://www.dynamodbguide.com/the-dynamo-paper/

That's the problem, business systems are not complex, they are incredibly simple, they are made complex by the way we think about and structure our models and then interact with them. We have the wrong boundaries, and the wrong languages

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#366

Post by julvo »

rqmedes wrote: post #365
dodobirdlord wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are no major systems out there of even moderate complexity that aren't built on an rdbms. I don't think this claim is accurate. https://www.dynamodbguide.com/the-dynamo-paper/

That's the problem, business systems are not complex, they are incredibly simple, they are made complex by the way we think about and structure our models and then interact with them. We have the wrong boundaries, and the wrong languages

Would you be able to point me towards modelling approaches/boundaries/languages that would be more appropriate? I'd be interested to learn about better alternatives, as I don't yet see the big flaws in relational models

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#367

Post by CGamesPlay »

samstave wrote: post #324
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 d…

I disagree with you! Looker is more advanced, and that does not mean it is better. Tableau’s tools were MUCH easier for me to make ad hoc analyses with, as well as to create dashboard with. Yes, there were some transformations that I couldn’t apply and had to go to custom SQL or ETL for, but the total time to finish my analyses and produce high-quality live dashboards was much less than with Looker.

(I don’t know why you are being downvoted though, you’re entitled to an opinion same as me)

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#368

Post by alexis2b »

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?

You might want to check Striim - it wraps kafka + streaming transformers with a scripting language, and a visual pipeline design tool. It then offers some really nice dashboards with a real-time “feel”. Not affiliated in any way but I took it for a spin and was happy to see how much could get done with it in just a few hours and without prior knowledge.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#369

Post by danielscrubs »

michaelmarkell wrote: post #313
danielscrubs wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve used PowerBI but it feels extremely limiting if you have a coder background. Don’t know a single person who likes the BI tools that exists today and I’ve worked with a lot of BI people. I’m convinced BI people becomes coders solely because of the bad tools that exists today. Intelligent autocompletion, git and strong types? No! But here, have some drag and drop!

PowerBI is working hard to accommodate developers - for instance, we now have the ability to create custom python visualizations ( https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/python-visualizatio... ) Disclaimer: I work for PowerBI

A great start! If you could export a PowerBI dashboard to python and back that would come a long way.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#370

Post by dmor »

swuecho wrote: post #348
dmor wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some great tools in this space, definitely worth exploring. Our vision is to glue the steps from ETL to dashboard together in an end-to-end solution. We pick whatever we consider best in class and integrate it. So far, we've got Singer, DBT, Jupyter Notebooks and Apache Airflow and we're using VueJS for both the product UI and our website. We're also working on a blog post exploration what other acquisition…

thanks for the product. I checked Singer, DBT, both of which are great idea and product. I build one very similar (conceptually) to DBT in my last data project. (I would not if I knew dbt is there). Airflow is too heavy weight for me, I use Scons to do the workflow management. meltano must do a lot of work to integrate all this together. I wonder what is the general user experience is. To me, seems too heavy weight.

Ideally, to abstract away complexity (which is what causes that “heavy” feeling)
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