Two weeks ago I was lucky enough to visit some of my new and old customers in the sunny Bay Area. To make it more interesting I opted for a short presentation at Netflix to talk about Tableau Server Architecture, Abstract Query Caching and Fusion plus dashboard optimisation. I was super jetlagged but still I enjoyed a lot.
Slides? Here they are: (more…)
One of the biggest myths of Tableau Javascript API is that you cannot use it inside Tableau Server. Some says that you need to embed your workbooks into external sites to leverage Javascript API. Well, don’t believe them since Tableau JS API works flawlessly in Tableau Server Vizportal with any workbook without any with some minor hacks.
Do you need D3.js in your workbook that interacts with the other sheets in the workbook? No issues. Want to re-define some part of the portal like what should happen when users want to export or see underlying data? It’s easy. Add excel export directly to the exporting options? It’s an hour of work. But how? (more…)
Tableau’s Javascript API evolves fast. In just a few versions we have arrived from the basic embedding to an event based, fully asynchronous API. Maybe the last, missing piece was accessing the summary and underlying data (however most of us used the
vud vizql controller to get the underlying data as featured in our excel downloader for tableau). With Tableau 10 this is also possible in a standard way: you can use two new Sheet level getData functions:
getSummaryData() and
getUnderlyingData() .
But why is this such a great deal?
If you’re not familiar with the Zen Master concept you can read more about the zen mastership and nomination process here: https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/ZenMasterNomination.
And now my nominees in alphabetical order:
In this short tutorial I will go thru the basic steps of creating a project that uses Tableau JavaScript API. My intent is to show non-developers how the typical implementation workflow looks like. Obviously, there are multiple ways to achieve the same goals but the way of implementing new web applications is pretty much the same. Let me share my flow and show how I usually setup a development environment, embed a view and capture parameter and event changes. I will use my chess game as an example. (more…)
No doubt that chess is one of my favourite game. It’s more than 15 centuries old but still fresh and enjoyable. Also no doubt that my favourite data visualization tool is Tableau so why not mix these two together? That’s the motivation of my new Tableau game, the Tableau Chess that is running entirely in a Tableau Public workbook using some javascript coffeescript magic. (more…)
Last week I had the opportunity to show some of our solutions at ISATUG (International Server Administration Tableau User Group). One of my topics was graceful restart, because, yes, I still find it so useful that I want to share this goodie as much as I can. And to share something that actually works in practice I wrote a small plugin for our very-best Palette Enterprise Tabadmin (we call it pet) distribution that works standalone and can do the graceful restart magic what I explained in Graceful Restart Part1 and Part2. (more…)
Graceful restart, the promise of restarting core components like vizqlserver without impacting the users. As of now there is no official support from Tableau Software to do black magic like this, but yes, you aren’t here for official supported stuff. You are here for actual solutions. Considering that you know how Tableau Server’s configuration template engine works and familiar with the basics of tableau server gateway architecture including its services’ sticky sessions let’s jump into the details.
Tableau Software is continuously working on Server’s architecture to make it more robust, modern and enterprise grade. However, it still has its design heritage and technical dept that make some tasks too complex or uncomfortable. One of these is the way how minor and major configuration changes can be applied. Even if we made tiny changes like enabling repository’s readonly user or allowing peeps to access systeminfo.xml we do need a complete server restart.
Currently, the limitations of the out-of-the-box online reload are:
Don’t worry if some of these points are not clear, we will discuss all of them in details sooner or later. In advance, there is a rumour that Tableau is working on Linux version of the Server. That will require a new tabadmin model as well as additional options to reload service configuration without restart using HUP signals in apache2 or redis for instance. Thus, when these changes happen my current post might be outdated I think at the moment it makes sense and helps to understand how Server operates.
