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Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

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Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#381

Post by mr_toad »

aheilbut wrote: post #323
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.

The kinds of analysis and visualizations you can build in 5 minutes with Tableau (and the ability to explore the space of possible analyses and visualizations) would take hours of futzing to reproduce with python.

You can build a basic report in 5 minutes. Then you’ll spend hours tweaking it and making all the changes the boss wants. And then hours more discovering there’s things you simply can’t do (but you’re boss won’t accept that).

And next week you will have to do it all again, because it’s all manual.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#382

Post by mr_toad »

dragonwriter wrote: post #315
manigandham wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> How many business users are going to use Juypter notebooks? None, because it's too much programming for IT to let business people have access to it, and it's not disguised as an office productivity app the way Excel is. If they had access to it and had basic training on it that anyone already competent in any vaguely quantitative domain could handle, plenty of them could and would. At least judging by my experience…

Python is making some inroads in shops that have been using SAS and/or R, but it’s a hard sell. Jupyter is even harder to push because of the server element.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#383

Post by jlj »

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…

If you can get your data safely to S3, Athena can handle a lot of reporting and analysis use cases. The table or view definition can handle the normalization process. Full on ETL pipelines are sometimes (but not always) more engineering than necessary.

(Disclaimer: I work in data engineering at Amazon and use those tools in my day to day)

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#384

Post by muse1489 »

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?

If you familiar with Druid then Check out Metatron Discovery( https://metatron.app) Druid is strong for data streams.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#385

Post by erichocean »

timClicks wrote: post #310
initself wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ungodly expensive. PostgreSQL on the other hand - so good, so free!

Just make sure that you tune it for analytical workloads. Its defaults are very conservative and lean towards transactional workloads.

Do you have a link for more info on how to tune Postgres for analytical workloads? TIA

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#386

Post by dustingetz »

julvo wrote: post #366
rqmedes wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Datomic https://www.datomic.com/ a not-sql cloud database with a robust and principled information model competitive in use case with rdbms. In agreement with your parent, Datomic is very different and most commonly used from the Clojure programming language which rejects similarly much mainstream thought/practices. https://clojure.org/ https://clojure.org/about/state The talk Database as a Value https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Datomic-Database-Value/ is a good starting point to understand the flaws in relational model implementations (it has been argued on r/clojure that Datomic more faithfully implements relational algebra than RDBMS does – https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/99f4ln/datomic_is_...)

Counter-intuitively Datomic is in violent agreement with /u/rqmedes where he said "A better alternative is having the data, data model and business logic tightly bound in one place. Not separated in multiple "tiers"" – Datomic inverts/unbundles the standard database architecture such that the cached database index values are distributed out and co-located with your application code such that database queries are amortized to local cost. Immutability in the database is how this is possible without sacrificing strong consistency, basically if git were a database you end up at Datomic.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#387

Post by sireat »

turtlebits wrote: post #301
bduerst wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to teach Tableau too and while you're right, the tool still becomes useless after graduation because of the ~$1000/yr price tag. From there, tableau becomes a "learn it just to get hired at a company that might use it" tactic, which is a valid job hunting strategy but is not something useful to learn in a data viz class, especially since there are other data viz tools the students can learn and keep using afte…

Are you teaching how to use Tableau (the product) or Data science/BI? Because I don't think you should be learning how to use a specific software product at school unless it's vocational. That said, I don't see why any student couldn't continue using the free Public version.

You are aware how crippled the free Tableau version is? Just public dashboards no saving functionality at all.

Judging by the sparsity of the public dashboards seemingly no one is using the free version.

As bduerst said, learning Tableau is only useful if your employer will be paying for it.

So I briefly cover Power BI and concentrate on Python. I'd rather spend more time on various visualization methods in Python.

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