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Asking 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
by topogios 11y ago
Asking 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.
- melted 11y agoBasically same here, but a few years earlier. I consider a three hundred line stack trace to be a valid reason to replace a system with something less operationally challenging. When engineers are $100+/hr, and some way more than that, it often ends up being cheaper as well.
- bsg75 11y agoThe record setter I saw was 1,500 lines from two JDBC exceptions.
- physcab 11y agoLess moving parts. If I get a request from a PM, I quickly open up Tableau, select a datasource or write some SQL and deploy. Sometimes data asks that they think would take 24 hours or more can be turned around in under an hour with Tableau. You can also train and hire less technical people to use Tableau...its basically like advanced Microsoft Word.
- IndianAstronaut 11y agoI don't think enough people have tried Shiny. It is fantastic and super easy. People really assume it is very difficult to get a grasp of.
- mrgordon 11y agoYeah I agree. We moved our visualizations from an expensive SaaS product to a few page Shiny metrics app that costs almost nothing.
- bsg75 11y agoDid you hit any limitations (ex. authentication) without Shiny Server Pro? https://www.rstudio.com/pricing/ https://www.rstudio.com/pricing/
- mrgordon 11y agoNo, although it required a little ingenuity. We would have considered using Shiny Server Pro for the auth and other features but we wanted to use our single sign on service. What we did was we put Nginx in front and had it call a tiny Rails app that handles authentication via the SSO. If Rails returns the correct status to Nginx, then the client is redirected to the Shiny page they requested. Its a bit of a one-off but it does work well! One more step towards making R fit for production :)