About MS presentation layer slacking behind, we should all push to change this. MVPs and partners apparently are not enough.

As a Microsoft consultant myself, I’ve worked closely with a couple clients now that use Tableau and am intrigued by how fast they are able to create analysis, and drill-through to the detail data without having to write any code, or subreport, or drill-through action, or without the help of some 3rd party add-in.

I’ve also been mindful of big enterprise clients that not only use Tableau as their enterprise analytical tool, but they are also some of Microsoft’s biggest enterprise customers. The ones that come to mind from the last PASS Summit are Yahoo and Klout. Both use SSAS for its performance and semantic layer, but then are able to deliver powerful dashboards and visualizations that can be shared with the rest of the organization.

The point here is that one cannot compare Tableau to Microsoft BI as a whole. That wouldn’t be fair to either vendor. Tableau can only be compared with what its intended focus is: Analytics, Visualizations, and distributing that discovery to the enterprise. That means we’ve got to compare Tableau with SSRS, PPS, and Power View. Clearly, we are at a disadvantage with our dashboarding tools being completely seperate from the tools used to create OLAP data sources. So to Jen’s point, this allows customer’s to gain value faster just having to develop their semantics in one integrated tool. No seperate add-in or different SKU product. No multi-developer languages to learn: MDX, DAX, DMX, SSRS Expressions, PPS Time Intelligence, etc.

Now, that’s not to say its all fun and games with Tableau. Tableau has certain things its not good at, like tables or lists. Like, you would never write an invoice report in Tableau, or create a label report for printing bar codes. However, that’s not intended focus.

What is also apparent is how easy it is for Tableau Server users to share their work and have great drill-through, sort, and filter capability out-of-the-box without a line of code, subreport, or add-in. Tableau Server is easy for a non-IT person to install, and they can start sharing workbooks to the enterprise right away.

I read your other post of the things you wish Microsoft BI had, and of those, Tableau has got the simplicity thing down. More importantly, it knows who Tableau is. Its listening to customers and their needs instead of developers, as you indicate. So there’s a lot Microsoft can learn from them, IMHO.

Thanks.

Haven’t been to your blog in years, but it was one of my faves while I was at Microsoft.

I saw a link to this post on the Twittersphere and just wanted to chime in on the first couple points that you made.

Tableau doesn’t actually need to load all the data that you want to analyze into RAM. It loads only the columns (or portions of the columns) necessary to answer the question being asked. In a worst case scenario, it’ll actually “page” much like an OS.

Therefore, it’s not constrained by the amount of RAM on the client. I regularly work with customers using 250M – 1B rows on the client — data that would take up way more space than the 4-8 GB of RAM on a commodity laptop has to offer

Tableau also connects “live” to data sources and doesn’t need to “own” that data – so to us, upgrading to an Enterprise Data model is largely a no-op. Our users will point directly to the big SQL/Oracle/Teradata/Whatever box out of the gate and have at it…

Tableau security is also pretty slick — and flexible. You can provision security rules in a number of ways:

– Simple “User / Group XYZ can see dimension members [P, D, Q]” selections – configured via a dialog.

– Simple calculations (sort of like SSAS “Advanced” dimension security) to determine which dimension members / measures / cells are available

– Moderately complex calculations which utilize dynamic “security bridge” tables which define who can do what — the same basic idea as “Security Labeling” ala the SQL Server Security Labeling Toolkit.

I don’t generally position or use Tableau as a data modeling tool. To me, joining a few tables together and adding some new columns is more akin to throwing up a quick and dirty ODS vs doing true modeling. A Tableau extract is not a replacement for a true DW.

I personally feel that when it comes time to “go enterprise”, one needs an IT sponsored / created model vs. something a user put together themselves. Call me a traditionalist if you must 🙂

“I LOVE Microsoft BI but honestly Tableau offers the front-end that Microsoft has been sorely lacking…” Things are changing….but I really wonder how much from the Tableau visualization prowess regular business users actually use. I’m inclined to contribute the success of the “explosive” growth of the data discovery tools to very effective marketing (which in many cases borders with outright lies, such as that data warehousing is not needed, OLAP is obsolete, self-service BI is a panacea, etc.) and glitzy front ends. As you know, I have my own stories to share….

Thank you for being an avid reader!

Tableau and Power View may look similar but are completely different with regards to available functionality, both breadth and depth of functionality, and the types of use cases each tool can fulfill. Power View, intentionally by design tenets, is not a deep analytical tool. Tableau, by design, has much deeper analytical functionality than Power View. Tableau can leverage PowerPivot and SSAS as data sources – and – many Tableau customers do use both together. It is not a one or the other choice.

Tableau’s sematic model is a “shared data source”. The label is misleading. The shared data source is the semantic layer. Keep in mind that Tableau is also often used on top of PowerPivot or SSAS models. There is a whitepaper on this topic available.

It is not Tableau’s desire to replace xVelocity, ParAccel or other in-memory players. Tableau’s focus is on the front-end, deep analytics, statistics, and visual analysis.

Tableau is highly scalable. It has a distributed architecture and I suspect there is some education that needs to take place to learn how Tableau scales. here is a link to the docs http://onlinehelp.tableausoftware.com/v8.0/server/en-us/help.htm#distrib.htm

Tableau does have much deeper security than you describe. Again I think there is some education needed. Tableau can leverage security defined at the data source such as SSAS – or Tableau data level security called “user filtering”. See http://onlinehelp.tableausoftware.com/v8.0/server/en-us/help.htm#security.htm

Regarding usability, Gartner cites Tableau customers as having the fastest solution time to value over all the 20+ BI vendors for several years now. I would counter back that I have seen my fair share of business users abandon PowerPivot because they can’t figure out basic time intelligence that is out-of-the-box with Tableau and dimensional modeling. Most business users don’t have a clue what dimensional modeling is. They rarely add a time dimension table unless a BI developer showed them. In almost every PowerPivot POC, I saw business users fail until a partner was paid to come in and train them. It is not Tableau’s goal to replace PowerPivot but I would say pointing Tableau at a data srouce and getting functional is far easier and faster than any of the alternatives out there.

Other key reasons why I liked the Microsoft BI + Tableau combination are as follows:

– Browser mobile for all platforms and Native Mobile Apps for Andriod and iPad
– Web Authoring that also works for mobile
– No AD or SharePoint required, and a variety of APIS for ISVs that need to offer BI in their applications
-Multi-tenancy and external reporting, something that is really difficult if nt impossible in Microsoft BI world
-Rich array of data source connectviity with enhanced drivers, Tableau has teams that build additional functions on top of base drivers
– Deep geospatial mapping and layering capabilities – things like drive time radius, weather overlays
– All views can be payed over time – not just scatter
– Deep statistical, linearn and nonlinear modeling
-Visual grouping, viewing details, exporting details, enhanced tooltips with charts on them or actions with parameters to launch related web apps/views like a Salesforce.com record
-Ability to render more than 1,000 data points (Power View limit) : Tableau can render over 1,000,000 data points
-Subscriptions and personalized view saving
– Wonderfully easy server installation that can be done in a few minutes that contrasts with minimal couple days of SharePoint, SQL Server, Kerberos, AD and all the related tricky, time consuming and complex installation joys of Microsoft BI world.

I LOVE Microsoft BI but honestly Tableau offers the front-end that Microsoft has been sorely lacking since Proclarity was killed. Excel is just not enough. Tableau and the rest of the data discovery tools have explosive, over 100% YoY growth. Microsoft back-end with Tableau front-end is being widely used in the largest enterprise accounts. If you practice Microsoft BI, than you should also have Tableau in your skillset. There is very high demand for that combined expertise – thus I invited you to learn and get a piece of that business too.