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