Devops everywhere celebrate.

Why?

If you've ever run tableau server, you know why.

I run a small one, with little effort other than what comes along with Windows - its our only Windows based system.

I would be interesting to know what the problems you have faced are.

I think a better question is what problems they haven't faced.

This is an extremely frustrating thread to follow. We have some people who have run a Tableau server with no issues, and now two people who are effectively saying "oh, it's awful but I have no interest in telling you why".

I wouldn't even know where to start to be completely honest.

Thanks for your honesty, but I hope you understand that's completely useless. I might have preferred if you lied.

five people telling in detail horror stories that make every other devop feel the pain? (except those seasoned exchange-experts of course)

did you ever consider there might be valid reasons some folks prefer *nix based servers?

five people telling in detail horror stories that make every other devop feel the pain?

Check the timestamps of those messages vs mine. At the time there were only the two responses I mentioned.

My experiences are very different.

Many Linux services have a concept of reloading. If the config file changes you can send the running program a signal and it will re read the config. This is very useful for production systems.

Tableau (9 at least) has no such concept.

Change the email address it reports to? Restart tableau.

Change the location of the SSL certificates? Restart tableau.

Want to apply an update for tableau? Uninstall your current version and install the new one. Oh and until recently when you downloaded the installer for tableau server the file name didn't actually contain the version number.

This product was not designed with ops in mind at all.

Edit: I forgot, I've actually had a tableau server fill itself up with logs. Tableau has logs in many different locations outside of windows event viewer and doesn't include log rotation facilities for all if them.

Those things are indeed a pain with Tableau, and also common with a lot of Windows based applications.

Never understood why Tableau is either Windows only or has the restart to reconfig issue. Last I looked, it was largely a Tomcat and PostgreSQL based product.

What's the actual issue with restarts? Is the downtime due to a restart unacceptable? Is it that users lose application state when a restart happens?

Just trying to understand since I've written software with the same restart to config workflow and would like to understand what causes it to be problematic.

If you run tableau in an enterprise environment you will likely have a lot of c level executives, global sales teams and more relying on tableau to be available outside of your local business hours. This means any maintenance needs to be planned and communications sent out to all stakeholders.

If reloading was an option then there wouldn't be downtime, and I wouldn't need to schedule a maintenance window for something as simple as updating an email address. The idea being that if there is a config error during a reload, the system just continues uninterrupted with the original config. If I have to stop the system completely in order to run the config sanity checks when it starts again, the potential for prolonged downtime is much greater.

Thanks for that perspective, I hadn't thought of that.

Would a system that did something like an internal cut-over be useful? e.g. try to start a whole new instance of the application, if it loads, then let it become the running application, if not, write an error log and shutdown?

It would still lose all the state associated with the previous instance, e.g. user sessions, but would avoid this specific issue.

I agree that it's pretty silly that things like email addresses need a restart, but I'm wondering in general how bad this pattern is.

Well, as some who doesn't can you enlighten me?

I would very much like to know what particular issues you are having as well? I work at Tableau and I would like to make sure that issues people are seeing are on our radar, if they aren't already.

Thanks for asking. I just installed 9.0.4, and here are a few examples:

- Tableau Server runs only on Windows, so why can't it use a TLS certificate and key from the CryptoAPI certificate store, rather than requiring these to be converted to PEM format (with Unix line endings!) and saved in the file system?

In an enterprise with an internal CA using Active Directory Certificate Services, these extra steps have to be done not only at installation but also every time the certificate expires. Compare the experience with Microsoft IIS: the server automatically requests a renewal from AD CS, retrieves the new certificate, and begins using it.

- Tableau Server should be able to run as a Group Managed Service Account, so we can give it access to remote data sources without having to assign (and regularly change) yet another service account password.

- It would be helpful to have an scriptable installation process; as far as I can tell, there's no way to install Tableau Server without clicking through wizards.

[1] I had to set the client-side map rendering threshold to a very high number (100000 I believe) to get maps to render at all. Server-side rendering doesn't work, even though it can contact the map servers and display all of the examples in the documentation (Miami/Havana I think?).

[2] It's been a few months, but I remember getting the license activated offline was a weird process. Something like, point tabadmin toward a license file, which generates a number or json or some other file, which you then paste into or point the UI toward, which gives you another file to use in tabadmin... and at the end tabadmin gave me error. Now when I go to "Manage Product Keys" it acts as though it is unregistered, but the server still starts without error (it did not before the failed activation ritual).

I do have a ticket in with support for [1]. Given how much of a bitch it was to activate (or half-activate) I'm reluctant to investigate [2] further.

Also, I'd like to see a linux server. Tableau is our only Windows server, which weighed heavily against the product when we were considering alternatives.

Having to program against its APIs recently:

1. No ability to use a 3rd party auth provider AFAIK, which means either keeping tableau passwords in a database or having users remember two different passwords

2. Embedded views use synchronous requests, which can easily hang the browser. Synchronous XMLHttpRequest has been deprecated for a while. I think I even saw a version of dojo from 2005 being loaded.

3. Reports are either static size or dynamic size, and unless you're using the (clunky but well documented) JS SDK, there's no way to tell.

4. Viewing reports in the browser is sloooooow. Browser console output is filled with warnings.

5. In order to put together sheets from multiple workbooks into a browser-based view, you need to either a) load the jssdk for each of the workbooks and query for sheets, which is extraordinarily slow, or b) do it with the REST api, authentication with which is asinine in nature (see #1).

1. No ability to use a 3rd party auth provider AFAIK, which means either keeping tableau passwords in a database or having users remember two different passwords

The answer is SAML/ADFS. You should look to enable this integration. If you are not using AD/LDAP, that's a whole different story. But SAML/ADFS is pretty much the standard way since Tableau is a Windows service, it is very natural to just use AD/LDAP/SAML.

huge corrections under way, guarantee this is not the end, just the beginning.

unicorn slaughter.

upside: expect house prices in the SF bay area to become more affordable.

Doubtful - if global investors aren't putting their money into stocks, they'll just continue to buy up real estate.

Once you take the crazy money out of the equation, the SF Bay Area is not that appealing as a pure real estate play.

Whys that? Year round awesome weather not good enough?

Russians and Chinese are a major contributor, and they're not so affected by SV cycles.

What's SV?

I don't know about SV, but foreign investment is pretty dam low in Victoria, BC, which could be used as a proxy for Vancouver. 97.8% were domestic buyers.[1]

It's not foreign buyers driving up the market in Vancouver, it's Canadians will to put themselves into serious debt in order to buy a house.

[1]http://www.greaterfool.ca/2016/01/31/of-debt-data/

What? No, the Chinese are still heavily interested in the Vancouver market. Since when is small Victoria a proxy for big Vancouver?

Actually, it is foreign investment: http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/in-a-six-month-peri...

  "In a recent six-month period about 70 per cent of all
   detached homes sold on Vancouver’s west side were
   purchased by Mainland China buyers..."

Even if those numbers are off, it's a huge influence on the market.

I'm not so sure about that, a lot of the conditions previously supporting real estate investment have given way. Oil's down, China is volatile, interest rates have risen, arguably you could say the trend could reverse due to people who previously bought as investments needing their money back.

upside: expect house prices in the SF bay area to become more affordable.

Until the Chinese peg falls, I don't think you can. I mean, aren't SF house prices driver by Chinese investors about as much as by domestic Twitter millionaires?

It's probably supported by both. But if prices fall, that could lead to Chinese abandoning the market and dropping prices further.

Correct. Cash real estate purchases by Chinese nationals will continue to dwarf those of Silicon Valley employees.

Are there any sources / links you can share on cash real estate purchases in SV or Bay Area? I'm interested in reading more about this and a preliminary search isn't yielding any recent news.

Tableau and LinkedIn aren't exactly early-stage startups. They have pretty established businesses.

...but Tableau is in Seattle.

"Tableau Software tumbled 36% after management warned it was unlikely to realize benefits of certain tax assets. The news sent shares spiralling despite the software company's better-than-expected quarter. The company earned 33 cents a share, more than double estimates."

Also their growth is down.

What is a tax asset?

Suppose hypothetically that you have an agreement from a firm to pay you money in the future. That agreement is carried on your business' books as an asset.

Your friendly neighborhood tax agency is a special case of firm, which can commit to paying you money in the future. One way they can do this is, when you lose money in year N, they can let you carry that loss forward for up to X years, so that when you're taxed on your income in year N+3 you might be able to offset some of that income with the loss you made years earlier, reducing the amount of tax you incur.

The guesstimated value of that offset in taxes is your tax asset. If your marginal rate is 30%, and you can offset $1 million in revenue, the implied value is +/- $300k. Importantly, if you guesstimate poorly or your friendly local tax agency decides to change rules on you in the interim, you have to adjust the value on your balance sheet. This can be problematic if the tax asset is a material portion of your notional value.

Thanks for the explanation! I would say that if your PAST LOSSES are a "material portion of your notional value" you have a pretty problematic company anyway.

Atlassian is currently down 23%.

Linkedin is down 38%. Tesla is down quite a bit. My guess is that some VCs were leveraged and had to liquidate positions. Free money from leverage does not look as good when equities go down... I think we are heading for a most violent year on the markets. Pharma and biothechs will most likely be the only bright spots, especially anti-anxiety drugs... :-)

Keep plugging at building great software that actually helps make this a better place. Charge for it so you can survive this downturn. It's a cycle, this will weed out the nonsense.

Linkedin is down 38%. Tesla is down quite a bit. My guess is that some VCs were leveraged and had to liquidate positions.

You're not a VC if your money is in publicly-traded firms.

Or maybe, this is a crazy idea, some VCs have diversified portfolios that include public stocks.

Did you think that as soon as a company goes public, VCs get to sell all their stocks?

You're saying that VCs (i.e. funds that do not invest in public companies) figured out they're too leveraged and had to sell the (public!) share of LinkedIn exactly as LinkedIn announced horrible results/outlook?

A few things in the above explanaiton aren't completely consistent...

VCs end up holding public shares when their portfolio companies IPO.

This is probably wrong. IMHO what looks like has happened is there are a handful of HN-relevant companies had weak earning announcements yesterday[1] after market close, and that is coupled with a weaker US jobs report [2], [3] today. The overall market is off and there are a handful of major drops for the companies mentioned but this is not some public tech market panic event (yet).

That's not to say we're not due a correction.

[1]: http://biz.yahoo.com/research/earncal/20160204.html

[2]: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/06/business/economy/jobs-repo...

[3]: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-markets-idUSKCN0VE0...

TSLA is getting hammered(incorrectly) by gas prices being at all-time lows. Sounds like a great time to buy some more stock to me :).

TSLA is getting hammered because analysts don't believe they'll sell as many cars as they say. Some of it due to lower gas prices.

I don't think gas prices impact the Model S/X, the price point is just too high to be a bracket where that's a major factor. I think that for the Model 3 they're going to be production constrained to a point where we'll see gas prices come back to normal.

Also a big factor in the TCO is the lack of maintenance and overall simplicity in a electric drivetrain and that's completely independent of gas prices.

Could it also be affected by the Amazon QuickSight preview that is going live?

I don't know what Tableau Software is and I found it pretty amazing that when I Google it I could still not figure it out because all the results were about the stock price. I think people might be focusing too much on stock price is Googling a company's name doesn't result in seeing the company's website on the first page of results.....

Tableau is a visualization software that you can bolt on top of many different data sources, from spreadsheets to BI tools and even AWS RedShift to get awesome looking dashboards and interactive visuals.

They are/were extremely popular with many sales organizations for internal dashboarding and even some media outlets used their stuff for public websites.

Sad to see this state of things for them, as the product was true good at one point. That said, I have not touched it in 3-4 years, so not sure how competitive it is now.

The product is awesome. I made some really neat visualizations and analyses with it during an MBA project using the 15-day trial. But it's ridiculously expensive - $1000 per year with some real limitations on how many data sources you can connect.

If I could dabble with it for $50/year I would. $1000 though? That limits their market tremendously to big companies only. It's hard enough to get an $80 tool approved.

-- Looks like they give it free for students now, which is cool: https://www.tableau.com/academic/student. But after learning it, there's no path to bring the software with them when they move to actual companies, because of the cost.

Tableau is an enterprise product and it's one the cheaper ones out there. You can't offer that kind of a product for $50/year.

Power BI, Microsoft's answer to it is $10/mo - yes, not $50/year, but a lot closer to that than to $1,000. The vis layer doesn't need to be expensive.

PowerBI has nowhere near the capabilities of Tableau.

On top of that, PowerBI is subsidized in order to funnel customers for SQL Server.

What's are some of the biggest things missing in Power BI compared to Tableau?

Tableau offers a richer end-user customization interface. Power BI offers custom visuals, but these are definitely developer-only at this point. The behavior you get from the baked in pieces is more rigidly defined than that from Tableau (monthly releases address these things one item at a time).

Out of the box mapping is miles better in Tableau.

Overall Tableau is more fully-featured than Power BI. Tableau aims to be a complete BI presentation layer. Power BI is positioned as the self-service and personalized consumption component as a part of a larger BI presentation layer. Microsoft would prefer that the entirety of the BI stack be made up of their technologies, but Power BI can consume other data sources, and its reports can be embedded in other apps, so it fits into other technologies as well.

We could go feature-by-feature and Tableau would win the majority of presentation sophistication bullets (more fine-grained control of display, filtering, interactions - richer collection of built-in visualizations).

The differentiator for Power BI is more on the self-service end. Personalized dashboards (dashboard and report are two distinct concepts in Power BI) can be trivially created from published reports. Customized reports can easily be extended from published reports and datasets. There's a strong collaboration framework based on Office 365 groups and with lessons learned from SharePoint. There is also a pretty seamless upgrade path. Power Pivot models can currently be promoted to SSAS, and the expectation is for the same to be possible with Power BI models (all the same backing database technology).

I hate to be so vague, but there's a lot to both products. I'd be happy to dive deeper into some specific cases if you've got questions.

Those are quite big products, making feature-by-feature comparison would be quite a daunting task.

It all boils down to this, in my opinion: PowerBI is for dashboards and reporting mostly. Tableau can do dashboards, but it can also do "analysis". Uncovering insights in the data that go way beyond simple cross-filtering.

In my mind, they are different tools for different purposes.

Qlikview costs quite a lot and I'd argue is also enterprise-grade, and doesn't have the same cost issue plaguing Tableau. Which is sad, because Tableau is probably the better product in many ways.

I am pretty sure Qlick deployments are way more expensive than Tableau ones because as far as I know it is more capable data modeling-wise. It is also nowhere near as polished.

PowerBI may be subsidized or not. But in our use-cases and in their documentation, it really doesn't funnel customers to SQL Server. Sure, it plays nice with SQL, SSAS/MD and SSAS/Tabular. But it also plays nice with many, many other data sources individually and in mashup. Its internal data modeling and ETL capabilities rival the power of SSAS and SSIS and they are free -- I see them as more of a competitor to SQL than a front end to it.

You may, but that's not how the strategy guys at Microsoft see it, according to their own words. Data modeling and ETL capabilities rival SSAS and SSIS only in very trivial scenarios.

I'm not saying that to bash on PowerBI. I love that product and use it heavily and promote it to clients. It just serves different purposes than Tableau.

We're using them for a client, and pretty much every client I've worked with lately is using them. I think they'll be just fine, it's still a good product.

Tableau is a surprisingly good desktop application for business intelligence and analytics that, IMO, grew too big for its own good. You plug it into data (spreadsheets, databases, you name it) and it makes it very simple (drag-and-drop simple) to crunch some numbers and produce interesting graphs, visualizations and analysis.

Some clever stuff they had was (early-RoR-style) guessing of data semantics based on heuristics (Column labeled "date"? probably worth grouping by months. Number pairs like -0.3242,0.12345 ? probably worth plotting on a map).

I have used trial and educational versions in the past and was always pretty impressed with the ease of use and the results. The product itself was > $1k so I never actually purchased a license.

Even though I didn't follow the strategy very closely, from what I've run into it seems lke their offerings were all over the place. I saw a local newspaper using a hosted Tableau product to display data visualizations on their pages (the kind of visualizations made by a company whose DNA is desktop apps, so kind of underwhelming). Their website is all about Gartner and enterprisey lingo.

The product itself is, well, some advanced version of Excel. This means you either sell a lot of it very cheap, or very little of it for a lot of money. Website design suggests the latter. Too bad it seems to not be working.

I'm honestly sad to see them do badly as I think the product was really innovative and it really changed my way of thinking about report building and analytics tools.

It's a pretty good product but everybody and his brother sells analytics and visualization tools, most of the companies that have been around a while sell a few different tools since they've grown by acquisition.

Tableau is more differentiated than it looks, but it doesn't look very differentiated. If Microsoft ever gets around to making many of the "smart" features in Excel actually work (i.e. csv import and automatically choosing what kind of graph to make) they will have nothing to stand on.

I'm just waiting for the street to realize that Hortonworks and their competitors also have zero moat, and if anything, a GUI interface for a Hadoop cluster is value subtraction in the age of devops.

Microsoft now has PowerBI in its Office suite that is pretty powerful. Its a Tableau competitor that I believe is a big reason that their stock is falling. It integrates with Excel, Access, etc. and a ton of different other non-Microsoft services.

Which level of office suite do you need to get this tool?

It's free, offered as a standalone service separate from Office. You just need to sign up with an email address from a non-free provider.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft.

It didn't work well in safari unfortunately. I use Tableau often so I'd like to see a competitive offering.

Any idea when the mac version is coming, if at all?

As part of Office 365 it's in E5 ($35) or as an add-on to other levels for $10 (per user per month). There's also a limited free desktop version.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

Honestly I have never used anything similar to Tableau in the balance of "straight-forwardness" and quality of results.

My use case is: here's some data, let's take a look at it and make some decent graphs including any sort of comparative analysis.

Excel is... well, Excel. The kitchen sink bundled in it contains pivot tables. Graphs are hideous out of the box, and very limited.

Apple Numbers makes cute looking graphs, but is extremely basic.

Viz toolkits in JS make you code for stuff that should be straightforward, at different levels of abstraction (Highcharts -> D3). And I have to put stuff in SQL and do the plumbing if I need any meaningful preprocessing.

Self-proclaimed "business intelligence" tools don't really target this use case. They solve enterprise problems like connecting to MDX sources that are not there for me.

Do you know any other tools for this?

I think if you are a smaller operation and you have specific requirements that you've thought out and aren't covered well by basic tools, then getting comfortable with JS and SQL (or R or matplotlib or Jupyter or whatever) is going to be the best way.

I've spent too much time watching people spend months and tens of thousands trying to bend 12 different third party tools together when a developer could do the whole thing in a week and it would actually do what you want it to do.

Nailing down the actual requirements is the hard part of building your own dashboard, it sounds like you've done that. If your needs are stable-ish or you have consistent developer resources it's going to be hard to find a better fit than that.

This. Freelancing is the future. Hiring in-house developers, or better still, freelance programmers will ensure that you will have custom-built your maximum BI tools and with a reasonable price. Of course, finding and hiring good freelancers who are not only dedicated in their craft, but also reasonably priced is a bit involved task, but certainly doable.

custom-built your maximum BI tools and with a reasonable price Have you ever really seen that happen? Not me.

Klipfolio?

And I have to put stuff in SQL and do the plumbing if I need any meaningful preprocessing.

Actually, the plumbing isn't as difficult as most people make it out to be. Nowadays, its the era of abstraction and FOSS infrastructure tools like jQuery, Bootstrap and like you mentioned, Highcharts. I'm a freelancer who quite recently developed a Tableau replacement for one of my clients. This client realized that all he basically wanted from tableau was a chart and some basic data manipulation like sorting, filtering and grouping (count, sum, average, etc.). All the things needed to develop this little app already existed in the FOSS world:

1. Highcharts/jqplot for charting.

2. Twitter-Bootstrap for showing a professional front-page and UI elements.

3. jQuery and jQuery-ui for DOM manipulation, AJAX handling for SQL queries, enabling drag/drop, etc.

4. PHP/Mysql on the backend (which is needed in anycase).

As for plumbing, each of these tools is so well-documented and also a simple Google search will point to tons of StackOverflow links that happily provide an answer to any and every question you may have!

tldr; Library/Framework plumbing might seem complex initially, but for a practiced Web-Developer, its like a cake-walk!

Hey, question on how licensing for highcharts works as a freelancer. Do you have your client buy a single website license with you as the dev? Or you have a highcharts dev license? Or something else?

Nope, we went for jqplot (http://www.jqplot.com/), it is GPL. The client initially wanted to go with Highcharts, but when we found about its licensing, I started looking for a FOSS alternative and this was what I found.

I'm similar, but use D3

There is Qlik and InfoCaptor

Have you seen Apache Zeppelin? For many use cases, I reckon it's a cheap alternative to Tableau. Any opinions on this?

Nail on the head regarding either selling a lot cheap, or little at high price. They went for the latter as you mention. I manage software licenses at my employer, and have been put off the price of Tableau, and the inflexibility they have. We're a consulting house, and mostly use Qlik. We started using Tableau last year.

The problem for us is that as a consulting house, our staff turnover rate is high (as expected I suppose), and this doesn't work well with Tableau's named license model. We've run into troubles where we reassigned licenses after people either left projects using Tableau, or left our company altogether. They ended up forcing us to buy extra licenses, which I was unhappy with.

My stance since then has been to avoid buying more licenses. We're getting our team skilled up more on web-based viz, so we can reduce our dependence on desktop applications.

My stance since then has been to avoid buying more licenses. We're getting our team skilled up more on web-based viz, so we can reduce our dependence on desktop applications.

Anecdotal, but I've seen this happen several times with clients who previously used Tableau.

It's a bit ridiculous. We get global discounts, but even then we still end up concluding that it's expensive. We only have desktop and online licenses, server licenses are rooftop crazy.

Would you consider building the visualisations yourself with something like R and Shiny? Self host the server, develop in-house, no more Tableau like problems.

I was working on a project where the client wanted to use Tableau and I pushed instead for Shiny, which is the way we went. Quite happy with the decision.

That is somewhat fine if your deliverable is the dashboard. But if your deliverable is the analysis and the report, this is a lot of investment.

A recent client of mine dealt with this by buying dedicated laptops to run Tableau on, when you needed to use it you just tracked down one of them. Seems like there should be a rule of thumb around this--software licenses should not be so expensive or inflexible that it's cheaper to buy a dedicated $1000 piece of shareable hardware than to get one for each user.

Interesting approach! How practical is it though? I can export a tbwx or whatever the extension is, so that those who need the dashboards can use Tableau Reader. I'm however wondering if such model would work for us.

The one thing that I like about Tableau is that its documents are XML, which plays nice with git.

Aren't their data extracts (TDEs) binary files?

What keeps you from running Tableau in a VM that any number of people can open independently?

I'm pretty sure that's against their license terms.

I used to work at a company where, under duress, I had to push tableau to its limits. My company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on it. The main use was to provide reports on the data created by the application we sold.

It would be great if it just stayed as a better version of the excel chart maker. Instead, it was seen in my company as a way to replace programmers. All of these types of applications have the same flaws:

They sell a dream that you can turn a complex task that requires experts, into a simple task that anyone can do. In reality, you either have a simple application that doesn't do much, or an extremely complex application that still doesn't offer the performance and flexibility of just using an expert.

You end up creating a programming via drag and drop application that is more complicated to learn than actual programming. You replace general programmers with useless tableau specialists.

It took the tableau experts weeks to do what a programmer could do in days when complex requirements came up. Most requirements were complex.

Tableau Server is very, very slow and requires massive resources to run.

Tableau had to run the full, unfiltered query so that it could generate filter lists with all of the possible options. This query was often too large to run.

I find that hard to believe unless you were searching just on Google News.

Searching "tableau" in Google stills shows their website as well as a large knowledge graph on the right hand side which tells you exactly what the company is about. There's News results at the top of the page, but there's still plenty of information, including the company website, on the first page of results.

http://i.imgur.com/tV89FoZ.png

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

Though the outcome is a bit worse than I think most predicted, this has been telegraphed since about November of last year. Tableau has had a very high short interest ratio for sometime, everyone was expecting poor results.

What really exacerbated their issue was that they didn't get out in front of this and let people know how bad they were going to miss. So when they released earnings everything went to shit on them.

I can't really find any excuse for this that passes Occam's razor except to assume this is a very rookie CFO /CEO combo in charge.

I made a comment about 3 months ago saying that 2010-2014 were very kind to new tech IPO's and 2016 would be the year that companies would have to either make money or face the consequences.

I'm following this over the next 2 weeks to see what the stock does. Its now a pretty good Pre-Merger Arbitrage(take over candidate) candidate.

- Market cap under 5 Billion, check

- Institutional owner ship > 50%, check

- Insiders hold less than 5% of the company, check,in fact its at 1.09%, wow, management doesn't even want to own the company!

- below its IPO price, not yet, that was $31 but its still falling.

Do you have any insights into how badly core infrastructure institutional investors are going to get hit when these large, institutional-owned tech companies deflate? Any metrics on how much of the equities market is owned by pension/retirement vs. free, non-dependent, non-core institutional investments?

It would make a nice acquisition for Microsoft...

Not after all the investment in powerbi, sadly.

Tableau wrotes the worst queries for Microsoft SQL Server products.

New Relic also down by 25%, crazy day for Silicon Valley.

Which is pointless since they had a great earnings report, were cash flow positive for the quarter and raised their guidance. Additionally they mentioned in the call that no sector is more than 20% of their customers so they are diversified if a certain sector really tanks - like tech. They have 180 million in the bank so won't need credit markets any time soon and gradually approaching profitability.

Disclaimer: I have a position in NEWR and added today at the 21 level. This will certainly bounce back in the comings months or years. Will add if the irrationality continues.

Just looked at it. No profit and trading at 10x revenues.

You might be right who knows, but can't realy say the fear on this stock is irrational at the moment, imho

It's trading at about 6x revenue right now and even lower when looking at forward revenues.

Their growth is tremendous and are on a path to profitability. I get it - when the market are getting banged around like it is, there are few safe places. I just think the baby is being thrown out with the bath water in a lot cases. I'm using this to average down a bit and hold.

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).

Have you used any tools built on top of DevExpress BI? How did they feel?

Never 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.

For that use-case is Tableau a more useful tool than something like Splunk or ELK stack?

Tableau is for business analysts. ELK is for Sys Admins. I think.

Tableau is for business analysts. Splunk is for Sys Admins. ELK is for engineers with a lot of patience.

The 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".

I'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?

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?

It 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.

Um, are you talking about Tableau or Mondrian coupled with Saiku/Pentaho?

Mondrian and Pentaho was a disaster for us, and Pentaho were pretty aggressive about trying to sell us a support contract to fix it

What were the technical problems causing the disaster if you can share?

We 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.

Basically 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.

I 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.

Yeah I agree. We moved our visualizations from an expensive SaaS product to a few page Shiny metrics app that costs almost nothing.

Did you hit any limitations (ex. authentication) without Shiny Server Pro?

https://www.rstudio.com/pricing/

Tableau 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.

The 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.

Looking 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.

Pricing 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.

I am stuck with SAP Business Objects (Crystal Reports) at my company. It is ok, but the features of Tableau look like they blow it out of the water. I've tried to get discovery projects started up to look at other options for due diligence. However no one seems to go for it. Oh well :/

It is expensive if you have a lot of people. Paying $2k for a license may be for two or three analysts is a good deal. Compare this to a start up like Looker which costs substantially more to get your foot in the door (last I checked, correct me if I'm wrong.)

IBM has chosen to display "Analytics" as a major piece of their company. Presumably they want investors to think this could generate billions of dollars in revenue yearly. Worst case scenario for me would be IBM to buy Tableau, but clearly for those of us who use it, Tableau is one of the best tools out there for what it does. Will it be able to keep its marketshare 5 years out? Who knows.

The low-price contender is Periscope (periscopedata.com).

For the record, Periscope has an incredibly poor UX. It suggests "run selected query" when you highlight a single column name... As if that's valid sql.

Are there other examples of poor UX? Overeager pattern matching alone wouldn't bother me, but if it's a sign of other inattentiveness...

Periscope is in a distinct, lower tier of usability. You write SQL. Or, put differently, the innovation of Tableau was so you don't have to write SQL for most visual encodings, even non-trivial ones.

However that does limit you a bit when wanting to do deeper analysis. Looker/Periscope are tools for analysts who know and are comfortable with SQL. (Disclaimer- no affiliation, just trying to build a desktop tool that sits in the spectrum between Tableau and Jupyter Notebook)

It's not PowerBI they are competing with. It's Qlikview. Their biggest issue is that Qlikview is viral: you can use the evaluation version ("personal edition") for as long as you want, but it has restrictions. With Tableau, you get a 15 day trial. Consequently, it gets used in businesses for small data projects, gets seen to be really effective, then the business realises it's effective and buys licenses.

Tableau isn't SAP, it just isn't. If they want to really get into businesses, then they need to be sensible and give people the opportunity to use it and then get it into the businesses they work in.

For instance, I used Tableau to learn it for the 15 days they gave me, and I learned quite a lot as they have great documentation, but then after the 15 days I got no more opportunities to go through their tutorials. Partially I got busy on other things and wanted to revisit it after a few days, but I also setup SQL Server SSAS which took me a bit of time. I got a maximum of about 5 days usage, after that there's no point having it on my workstation as it's far too expensive for me to justify buying a copy.

If I could have had more time with the product, I guess I'd know how good it is so I can recommend it to the business I work at. Unfortunately, I can't without cracking their trial limit code, which I'm just not prepared to do. For now, I guess I'll be recommending Qlikview which is a known quantity and very good also, though nowhere near as intuitive.

MS SQL server is very expensive, especially thanks since their recent license changes. Microsoft BI (PowerBI, etc) is to lock you in to their ecosystem (MSSQL, Excel, SharePoint/Office365, Windows Servers/Azure cloud).

The thing is, if you already decided on MS SQL Server, why buy Tableau? The company I work for has both, and Tableau is the most likely to be dropped of the two.

Hello? The MS SQL Server license has been changed to be per CPU core. Consultants want you to create a seperate MS SQL Cluster (serveral bare metal servers with many CPU cores). So MS BI will be a lot of more expensive as you first think. Most see just the Tableau is more expensive than BI and decide for MS BI just to find out MS SQL is rather expensive. Also you need at least MS SQL Server 2014, despite dark pattern speak (lies) about that 2012 may work too. Oh and don't forget they will mention that you will need a seperate SharePoint cluster (web and app servers) to run Excel webservice and the SharePoint based dashboards. Oh and you will need to upgrade all your clients with Office 2013. And they will invite your CTO to an Windows 10 event and give away some WinPhone10 and tablets. And then you will have to figure out how to comply to local state law by upgrading to the expensive Windows Enterprise LTSB license.

So what is cheaper?

'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).

Wall 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.

Just 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

I evaluated 15 different similar solutions and trying to settle on one. Curious as to what your friends are switching to.

I'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

Tableau 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.

I'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

Many companies have said things that never materialized. Landscape changes over time.

It'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.

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.

Most big companies are actually just fine with nonsensical results. It's a bit odd, but I've realized that nobody who uses BI actually cares much about data quality or integrity.

This.

BI in large corporations is usually done by people having no clue about the data, producing bullshit results, leading to "insights" to management (who at that point have have no clue that all the cost columns were added up, regardless of currency), leading to a final "product strategy" that gets implemented over the next years, while in all the companies still producing innovation, this is usually done by a rogue team applying common sense and ignoring that strategy all day long.

BI is pure feel-good for upper echelon.

wow.

i've only ever worked at small companies, and i guess to avoid things like this is why, but i can't help but wonder how common this is, and if in fact no one has ever used BI effectively. i find that hard to believe but really i have no idea, and its an interesting thought, makes you want to chuckle or shake your head or both.

I was a SI/BI engineer for a while; let me chime in to defend my people just a little bit :)

Certainly there are lots of bullshit metrics, there is often very little desire to audit data or even do a by hand sanity check once and a while.

That being said, there were _many_ engineers who actually gave a fuck about making sure we had telemetry in actionable, meaningful, and appropriate places, and unfrotunately the gap in analytics would take place far over their heads, when the upper management would produce documents with all the beautiful charts and graphs, communicating.... absolutely nothing.

Graphs with mixed axis scaling (log vs non log) graphs with mixed units, conclusions that are a total stretch from the data that's there and ignoring obvious conclusions that don't line up with what the managers want to say.

For there to be USEFUL BI (and such a thing certainly can exist) there needs to be a "this isn't bullshit" mindset up and down the whole stack, not just in engineer land.

What are they moving to ?

"You have no control over what queries it writes"

Huh? Just write a view or a stored procedure and point Tableau at that. There's no need to compose a query in the Tableau interface.

I can hack d3js. Can crunch billions of records in a flash of the eye, can wrangle most any DB (NoSQL, et al) out there, why would I need Tableau?

Answer: We want someone stable! Not some crazy hacker. Plus if we don't spend the cash, we don't have it in our budget next year.

Oh, I get it now. :-)

Tableau is for business users to generate graphs. Also d3js is a bear to work with until you've steeped your brain in it.

By your logic, there's no need to use MS Word, people should just use TeX.

No you don't get it. Tableau is for people who can't hack (or don't want to hack) d3js or crunch billions of records or whatever techie thing you seem to be so proud of. The mission is supposed to be self-service business intelligence, i.e, allowing a typical business analyst to drag drop and create good visualizations and analytics. Not dick around and waste time with databases and javascript.

Seriously? It's almost as if companies don't want to hire a badass hacker to generate a business report used by non-tech workers. Tableau has a huge place in the BI community, and the last thing that a manager wants is somebody hacking d3js to to create some visualizations.

$1,000 to generate a business report? That's how much a single Tableau license is going to cost you. You still need to train up the staff member to know how to use it (yes, it's probably the most intuitive BI tool on the market, but like anything it has a learning curve).

That's a lot of money for a business report.

Do you pay tableau $1000 per business report?

Nope. But if you work out costs, I think you'll find a dedicated developer on a contract may well work out the same amount as you spend on licensing.

No, you won't.

1,000 USD/yr for a license.. If you pay someone 100 USD/hr to do the work compared to 50 USD/hr for a random Joe Blow analyst then it only needs to save 20 hours of time.

ITT: A lot of people who don't realize 1k a year isn't an absurd enterprise price.

Also to clarify, the licence is $1000 for the first purchase. Subsequently, you only have to pay the maintenance fees of about usd 200 per year to remain eligible for support and upgrades. You can still continue using the latest version you were on in perpetuity.

How much for licensing the server itself?

Lol, so I use Tableau every week. For example today I had a government request to measure quantity of customers outside a particular business radius of 40km. Meaning what percent of total visits are in the radius vs outside it. I had 8k postal codes.

This took me literally 5 minutes in tableau, I would hate to see how long this would take you writing code.

..Just the tip of the example iceberg.

A programmers whose job is to make these kinds of reports will already have information about postcodes and so on, and take less time than you. Tableau is quick at doing simple things, but takes a lot of learning to do complex things. Often, you will have to resort to custom scripts, creating views, etc. Often, it just won't have the ability to do certain things.

Anyone with any experience in drag and drop applications will tell you that once things get complex, it ends up taking much more time using the simple drag and drop solution as you spend all of your time trying to get it to do something that is outside of a basic drag and drop model.

Are the complex requests in regards to getting/manipulating the data, or in the final visualization. I'm trying to build a desktop tool similar to Tableau but with the ability to easily drop down into python and do data manipulation with the pydata stack. Intended audience is the new breed of quantitative analysts/data scientists.

Actually the analytics is the missing part in d3 and charting libraries. http://www.infocaptor.com/dashboard/charting-engines-vs-anal...

Looker is a much better product.

I wonder how that will affect this:

"Tableau confirms big Kirkland expansion, plans to hire 1,000"

http://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/tableau-conf...

Tableau is definitely a useful tool. Tried getting folks with Tableau skills in previous whoishiring post. The other positions I posted got a lot of response but not the Tableau-oriented ones. Looks like plenty of enthusiasts in this thread through. Where were you all? Hey, in the off chance you are Iinterested in working in Tableau at a think tank (RAND) send me (Chris) a note at dev.hiring@rand.org.

There's a reason for this. Unless you work in an organization that has already implemented Tableau, or is willing to take a punt on using it, then there is just no easy way to get skilled up on it.

Tableau Public isn't sufficient?

Is it able to do everything the client software can do?

It's limited to flat files, so you have to plan ahead on what data you'll explore. In terms of the viz - feature parity, but not quite the same at all if you want to do exploration. Which is too bad, because Tableau's ease of exploration is what makes it so much more valuable than PowerBI or custom d3.

What is it lacking in terms of exploration? I thought most of the exploratory benefits were in the visualizations, unless you mean the ability to ad-hoc connect to random databases and begin exploration (because you have to plan ahead to extract flat files from those sources)

That is a key part of the value proposition!

I mean in terms of learning to use the exploratory/dashboarding functionality - it's fairly easy to do that with Tableau Public and public data sources (or your own if you are fine with the saved dashboards being accessible to the public).

About 5 minutes of searching shows me that Tableau has had a massive growth of revenue, but a slightly more massive growth in sales/administrative expenses. What that tells me is this: The market loves Tableau, and keeps buying more of it. But the company has serious cost control problems in its sales and marketing departments, and has expanded there far too fast.

Anybody comparing typical open source or low cost BI solutions favorably to Tableau hasn't used it, or doesn't value their own time. Tableau is easy and deep.

Tableau's board needs to attack their out-of-control cost of sales (the pay-me-everything egos), and hopefully ignore the internet idiot mob effect on their stock price.

I don't own Tableau stock. I just like the product.

Apologies if the following is ignorant:

My exp with tableau was always that they obfuscate the final query...

Fuck that.

Looker doesn't && they even allow a meta Lang on top of them.

So for you to say "just do X" leaves many less sophisticated orgs left in the dark.

So my comment is both:

Fuck their position and yours.

I don't want to pay bullshit fees to tableau (with perf hits) && not be able to see the final query && not need an actually fairly highly competent DBA to know that x+x+x needs to be enabled in order for me to get to root.

If I pay service X give me the full fucking understanding as to how service results are generated.

(Yes yes I do understand how saas blah blah works and I'm just saying I personally find this process bullshit and immoral)

Downvoted. Your point may not be ignorant, but it certainly seems that way given the unnecessarily violent language.

His/her words are too naughty to be tolerated? They offend you to such a degree that you can't just ignore them? Come on now.

It's more that they imply the poster is really angry. If you saw two speakers in the street, one arguing reasonably and the other swearing his head off, I think most people would place less value on the ranter.

Uh... Maybe you dont talk to your friends too often...

You should see me with many many of my friends - dont imply anger where there is none, as we often get in "mock heated arguements" with smiles on our face.

I love you.

It makes sense to talk that way to your friends, because you're already friends and there are stronger bonds holding you together. That makes shredding each other fun, because everyone knows it's in jest.

A large semi-anonymous internet forum like HN is at the opposite extreme. We're almost all strangers and near-strangers. The community has low cohesion, so the same behavior, with the same good intention, does harm.

You know how rugby players are famous for beating the shit out of each other on the pitch, then going out drinking after the game? I always envied those guys that experience. It works because they have high cohesion. They also know not to walk up to a stranger, smack them onto the pavement, and expect to be bought a beer later. You need to adjust for context.

Apparently, sadly, I feel a much higher sense of cohesion with the HN community than others do.

I was an early adopter of Tableau and fairly enthusiastic. But then I had a truly terrible licencing experience with them and have, since, refused to have ANYTHING to do with them.

Nice enough software, but a sleazy organisation. Use one of the other good alternatives.

Reporting --> Chartio, Sisense, Looker etc. (anything web focused without a desktop version pretty much)

Analysis --> Ipython

No room for Tableau and similar.

Tableau makes most straightforward analyses much simpler than attempting to do it in Ipython/pandas, especially when connecting to standard corporate data warehouses (probably on the order of 10x faster). Of course you quickly hit a ceiling in terms of complexity, but most analysts never really get to that point.

Tableau is a decent product, but a decent product doesn't make a great company. Main issues are:

A) Its sales team sells it as an end-to-end analytics suite, but in nearly all actual implementations I've seen companies just use it for management to view a dashboard... essentially just a slightly fancier version of the Excel doc some analyst used to mail out

B) It's crazy expensive for what it is

C) If the company has actual data scientists onboard then those individuals can do far better analysis just using free open source tools

For the above reasons and more I've seen a lot of large companies that are far less excited by Tableau than they were a year or two ago. They've either halted larger roll outs that were planned or just moved away from the platform entirely. That leads to softer sales and slams the brakes on growth rates... hence why the stock has tanked. There's also the issue of valuation multiples against their financials which are also still frothy, even after the latest downward movement in the stock.

I use Tableau almost daily. Initially I found it harder to work with and avoided it for a while. On 2nd attempt, for some reason, everything clicked into place and I now find it fairly intuitive. Some of my opinions/experiences about it:

- Beyond simple queries, it becomes more easier to setup a view or two behind Tableau than to do it purely in Tableau. E.g. multiple level of latest times, more complex aggregations etc are more easily done in SQL than via Tableau.

- For some things Tableau doesn't do what we typically expect. Couple of examples:

- If you run a custom query joining two tables with some of the column names being same in both, Tableau cannot deal with it. Setting alias for columns using "as" works fine in SQL so I think it is not unreasonable to expect that to work.

- I recently tried to chart lag in request/response in microseconds. The data is stored as TIMESTAMP in our Vertica database. However, I found that Tableau doesn't show time more granular than seconds. That is kind of odd in today's common low-latency high-performance technology environment

Having said that, I really like the features it offers viz. Calculated fields which don't go away just because I change the data source, drag-and-drop dashboard constructions, very nice visualizations etc.

What do you use it for?

If it's for analysis why not use python or R, way more powerful and full of tools & libraries that give you speed you need?

If it's for reporting, why not to use chartio, looker or anything that connects directly to your db?

My opinion: If you know some python or R, you might still need chartio, looker and similar but Tableau doesn't make sense anymore.

I wasn't part of the decision making effort but I believe Qikview was also considered but the analysts preferred Tableau. It is used by the analysts as well our for our internal monitoring/charting/analysis purposes.