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Tableau is a good product. I use it daily. There simply is no better alternative for quick ad-hoc, enterprise-level, intuitive graph and dashboard making. I've
by physcab 11y ago
Tableau is a good product. I use it daily. There simply is no better alternative for quick ad-hoc, enterprise-level, intuitive graph and dashboard making.
I've been at large orgs where we evaluated all the cloud services like Mixpanel and the ilk, but they are very different use cases.
Tableau + Redshift (or Vertica but Redshift is way less expensive) is the typical BI tech stack. When I go a client or a new job and ask them what they use for analysis and if they say "Good Data" or "MicroStrategy", I know my job will be a pain in the ass to get done. Its as if you're interviewing for an engineering job and they say "oh we all use NotePad here". Its night and day in terms of productivity.
I don't know what this means in terms of the stock, but all I can say is that I vouch for the product and think it has a lot of room to grow (from a BI perspective).
- chebum 11y agoHave you used any tools built on top of DevExpress BI? How did they feel?
- physcab 11y agoNever heard of DevExpress but just by going to the website it feels far less intuitive than Tableau. Tableau is so freaking easy that you don't need to be experienced in BI to be user.
- chris_wot 11y agoIf that's Tableau's target market then their 15 day trial is killing their business.
- spike021 11y agoFor that use-case is Tableau a more useful tool than something like Splunk or ELK stack?
- dev1n 11y agoTableau is for business analysts. ELK is for Sys Admins. I think.
- capkutay 11y agoTableau is for business analysts. Splunk is for Sys Admins. ELK is for engineers with a lot of patience.
- genericpseudo 11y agoThe ELK stack is really fancy next generation "tail -f | grep" in a web browser. Which is awesome and really important, but a very different problem from "tell me how many users have used my app for three or more days in a sliding thirty day window".
- jstandard 11y agoI've been eyeing a switch to the ELK stack from Mixpanel + Big Query for an app. Could you expand on what ELK is useful for?
- fidget 11y agoOh god, don't do it. Running E is a bitch, and incredibly expensive. To get L running over any kind of load, you need to do so many hacks.
- genericpseudo 11y agoAt work we use it for log aggregation (specifically application-health telemetry from a mobile application). Very useful in debugging.
- tetha 11y agoFrom experience, there's a nontrivial intersection between the BI stack and the operative administration stack. However, in the difference, the admin stack with ELK, Riemann, Graphite, InfluxDB, Airbrake, Icinga and whatever else assumes that 30% of the information right now is worth more than 100% of the information 3 weeks later. You know, my application port is closed, first level support is getting hell, I need any available information right now. On the other hand, the full data warehouse/tableau stack assumes that 100% of the information is more valuable than anything else. Good DWH-Guys and their analysts can do very awesome data voodoo, predictions and analysis, and the admin stack won't be able to reproduce most of that. It just takes 2 month of data collection and 2 - 3 weeks of analysis to get the result of that grand voodoo. And Tableau can automate that voodoo after it's been done once.
- topogios 11y agoAsking out of curiosity: What does Tableau offer that I can not quickly set up in either Mondrian coupled with a frontend like Saiku or Pentaho or eg. R and a Shiny server?
- melted 11y agoIt depends on whether you want your BI to be generated by a battle tested product, or by a melange of a rickety, buggy, half baked stuff that hardly anyone is able to use without paying $10K+/yr for a support contract.
- chris_wot 11y agoUm, are you talking about Tableau or Mondrian coupled with Saiku/Pentaho?
- peteretep 11y agoMondrian and Pentaho was a disaster for us, and Pentaho were pretty aggressive about trying to sell us a support contract to fix it
- topogios 11y agoWhat were the technical problems causing the disaster if you can share?
- bsg75 11y agoWe jettisoned Pentaho about 2 years ago because of the effort required to develop and maintain it. At the time, between the ETL and reporting layers, it acted more like a set of different open source apps simply branded together, and interop required more effort than what should have been necessary. Debugging was a nightmare as well. Huge stack traces on simple errors made locating problems difficult, and there seemed to be little information in the community. The number of Java library layers spewing out on a simple JDBC driver error was mind-boggling. Pentaho of course has a interest in revenue from support contracts, and most inquiries into simple issues in the forums led down that path. It may have gotten better since, but there was a long way to go. We switched to Tableau on the front end, and "old fashioned" ETL scripting in Python (now some Go) on the backend. At the same point today I would consider something like R/Shiny, but for speed of implementation Tableau would also be a contender.
- babo 11y agoTableau is a great product but with a high price stigma. I really like it, when clients asking for recommendation my first answer is Tableau. They like the product and the features but the reaction is always the same: nice, but it's too expensive for us, we'll go with PowerBI. Competing with Microsoft is a tough game.
- physcab 11y agoThe price is expensive but if I'm charging $100 - $150 / hr and it takes me twice as long to do something in PowerBI that it does in Tableau, Tableau quickly pays for itself for the desktop software. Then you can multiply that across a team of experienced BI professionals and even the product team because they can easily view workbooks and give feedback. That would easily outweigh the costs of Tableau Server.
- tyre 11y agoLooking at their pricing ($500/user/year) seems pretty reasonable for such a high-impact role. If you're at a company, the question is if it saves you ~5 hours in a year.
- physcab 11y agoIt absolutely does. I know what life was like before Tableau (MS Excel + webquery, custom highcharts, cobbling together graphs from multiple SaaS services, custom python+R code) and I can say it probably saves 5 hours in a day or two.
- chrischen 11y agoPricing isn't dependent on how much it helps you, but on how much more than competitors and alternatives. Otherwise food would cost an arm and a leg.
- ajmurmann 11y agoThat is not a adequate comparison. You aren't done after you bought the software. You need someone to set it up as week and that cost scales with the quality of the software you bought. You need to look at the cost you have once everything is said and done.
- clintboxe 11y agoFinally someone else who has felt that pain of GoodData.. I was hired to make it work after GD's consultants set it up at my current company. What a nightmare. It took a year+ but I finally convinced everyone that it was terrible and we switched to Tableau, which let us use our own db's instead of GD's terrible "logical data model"
- vadym909 11y ago'what it means in terms of stock' Exactly- The problems (big price drop) arise only when the stock price is at unreasonably high levels based on unreasonable growth assumptions by Wall Street. So the same people that cause it go 'bubble' then cause it to go 'burst' wreaking all kinds of collateral damage (employee stock options, morale, etc).
- hueving 11y agoWall Street isn't responsible for the bubble. It's the company leadership misrepresenting the company's road map. A stock won't become overpriced if the CEO blatantly says that sales will probably only go up 5% this year.
- latj 11y agoTelsa appears to have been overpriced for quite some time. The stock kept rising based on emotional reactions to videos of falcon doors, robot recharging arm, hypertube test tracks, and reusable space craft landing. If Elon Musk can make all that stuff happen surely he'll find a way to drive the stock up to $500? But even Musk was saying the stock was overpriced. And now it is correcting.
- njx 11y agoyou should check out the web based alternative http://www.infocaptor.com http://www.infocaptor.com 70% functionality of Tableau
- mrgordon 11y agoJust to offer a different opinion: I know a lot of people who have been switching away from Tableau or not choosing it and using a different solution (or multiple) instead
- rburhum 11y agoI evaluated 15 different similar solutions and trying to settle on one. Curious as to what your friends are switching to.
- mrgordon 11y agoI've been meaning to write a blog post about this actually. Maybe I'll actually do it :) I guess it depends what you're trying to do. What part(s) of what Tableau offers do you care most about? How big of an organization? Chart.io is one product I evaluated that met our requirements. We cared most about collaborative querying and the ability to run templatized reports (including regenerating them via the API) so we ended up going with Mode Analytics
- infinite8s 11y agoDid you look at Looker or PeriscopeData? +1 on that blog post comparing the different options.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- IndianAstronaut 11y agoTableau is not scriptable. 3 places I have worked are moving away from it because of this severe limitation. You have no control over what queries it writes and you can't easily add simple scripts to make things more seamless or performant, like say a quick scripted query to populate a dropdown menu.
- chris_wot 11y agoI've played with Tableau, is there no scripting at all? Their previous Director of Analytic Product Management Stephen McDaniel stated that in v8 they were going to add server side Javascript - and he said this in 2012... https://community.tableau.com/ideas/1694#comment-2661 https://community.tableau.com/ideas/1694#comment-2661
- notyourwork 11y agoMany companies have said things that never materialized. Landscape changes over time.
- chris_wot 11y agoAnd the need for scripting has not changed.
- physcab 11y agoIt's not very scriptable but that's not the use case of Tableau. Generally data analysts do not know how to program. They meet with PMs to understand concerns, interpret concerns into metrics, write some SQL, and display them in dashboards. While Tableau performance is a thing that people debate, its a non-issue. Generally, the data analyst produces a report that is consumed by 1-10 people and if that consumption grows >10, then the organization will "productize" the report by putting engineering resources on it and build something custom with HighCharts or D3.
- IndianAstronaut 11y ago>Generally data analysts do not know how to program In my experience, the ones that don't often produce some really erroneous or nonsensical results. Or even if they do get some things right, they have no ability to drill deeper.
- ziszis 11y agoWe used Tableau for about a year and then decided to drop them. The reason was a sudden change in licensing terms where: 1. The minimum step increase in server cores changed. 2. The cost to run ha increased. 3. The cost per core increased. The only thing that is worse than an expensive product, is one that has unpredictable pricing.
- aagha 11y agoFurthermore, their support is amazing. I've emailed their support in the last couple of weeks and they've called within an hour to help resolve the issue.
- yawgmoth 11y agoTheir desktop publisher or Tableau Server? Because Tableau Server is the biggest POS I have ever used. Their API is fundamentally broken, their authorization model misses large gaps, and client-integration is seemingly something they never considered.