Thursday, July 25, 2013

Installing v8 on Development Server

Use of v8 in a test environment went really well and right now we're updating the company's Tableau Development Server with v8.0.3. Here are my top 3 things I've liked about the v8 server (thus far): 1. The speed improvements of V8 with some of our data-intensive workbooks Filtering in v7 within some views (querying hundreds of millions of records) was taking about 45-60 seconds to resolve after selecting a filter. With v8 and a few design changes to the filtering method (i.e.: replacing quick filters with tables when appropriate) brought the time down to 5 seconds or less. 2. Altering and authoring a viz from server This feature is one I think many will experiment with, but likely one that only a handful of users will really work it over - those who don't want to develop will still come to those who do to try to get what they want. I suspect this feature will likely reduce the number of desktop licenses Tableau will sell to companies; but this also will entice companies to purchase Tableau Server and more core licenses. 3. Subscriptions I think subscriptions has the potential to be great and one that many will take advantage of; but it is not quite there yet. Currently subscriptions are only time-activated -- by that I mean once a particular time has been reached (once a day at 7AM or the first of each week/month/quarter) the action to email the subscriber takes place. This will be suitable for most workbooks and users; however, there will be those workbooks and users that need subscriptions to be event-activated, so when an event occurs (i.e.: new data extract, workbook republished, new comment to workbook, a certain threshold has been reached in the data to trigger an alert, etc) that the subscriber is alerted. Honorable mention goes to UI improvements (configurable column widths - about time) and improved admin views. The Java API would likely have made the top 3 had I had more time to play with it; I foresee us using this a great deal in 2014 as Tableau is rolled out to more within the company. I'm also looking forward to seeing how well Session Sharing does on a scale greater than my 15-20 v8 test environment. Keeping my fingers crossed that the install continues to go as planned. Andy

1 comment:

  1. All went well. The clean-up, back-up, installation and restoration of prior workbooks took just over 4 hours. All that's left is doing some light housekeeping as some groups within the company now want their own site and for me to add more users.

    Now to continue the training material I'm assembling to bring users up to speed on how to use the new functionality in v8.

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