Good to know: TableauFS is also available for download as a fancy docker container. Since Docker supports windows you can run the container directly on Windows and mount the contents of your Tableau Server directly as a network drive. Let’s see how easy is this in practice.

1. Install Docker

Docker is a container manager application  where you can download, share and build OS containers. First of all you need to download Docker for Windows. The installation steps are described here: https://docs.docker.com/installation/windows/. The guide is detailed enough even for newcomers.

2. Grant SELECT on pg_largeobject

Using readonly account in Tableau is unfortunately not enough, you need to read from pg_largeobject  table as well. The grant process is straightforward, just follow the steps described here: https://github.com/tfoldi/fuse-tableaufs#configuring-tableau-server-database.

Enable and grant select to readonly user

 3. Start the fuse-tableaufs container

This is the fun part. With one command we will instruct docker to download my image (if you don’t have it already), start it, mount your tableau server and make it available locally thru windows file share. Quite a lot of things from a single command line.

And the output should be:

Now the samba server is listening on default IP 192.168.59.103 port 445.

4. Map as a drive from windows

You can use Explorer to map the \\192.168.59.103\\tableaufs  share as a drive but I am still a console guy, so I do it with:

After the command you can browse your tableau server immediately:

Mount TableauFS docker container’s samba share as Z: drive

5. Enjoy!

Browsing the server as folder

In the next posts I will show how can you version control your workbooks or gain more insight from their structures. Stay tuned!

• About
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Tamás Földi

Director of IT Development at Starschema

Decades of experience with data processing and state of the art programming. From nuclear bomb explosion simulation to distributed file systems. ethical hacking, real time stream processing practically I always had a great fun with those geeky ones and zeros.

Latest posts by Tamás Földi (see all)

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