Curious what advanced features and technology updates Tableau has planned? We share highlights from the Tableau Conference
Tableau had many exciting announcements unveiled this week at the Tableau Conference, and to data people, it feels a lot like Christmas.
To summarize, here are the top three highlights of what’s coming to Tableau soon:
1 – Goodbye TDE, Hello Hyper
Early last year, Tableau announced the acquisition of Hyper, an innovative technology in data processing developed by a group of PhD students at the Technical University of Munich. There has been much buzz about this in-memory data engine and data enthusiasts have been eagerly waiting for its release. Now, Hyper is here in 10.5 beta.
At the Tableau Conference this year, Allan Folting, Tableau Engineering Senior Manager, compared Hyper to TDE, and Hyper certainly made a grand debut. Attendees witnessed Hyper beat out TDE round for round on query processing, extraction, and analysis – processing over half a billion rows instantaneously. Hyper will be replacing TDE as the data engine for all Tableau applications, including Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online, and Tableau Public. Hello Hyper!
2 – Viz in Tooltip
Veteran users of Tableau have been asking for the ability to display visualizations within tooltips for a while now. This function is finally available in 10.5 beta.
Dashboard creators recognize that the screen real estate on a dashboard is precious. Allowing visualizations in tooltips gives the dashboard designer the ability to maximize that space.
In addition, having visualizations directly in the tooltips enables the audience to explore greater details, highlight trends, and find additional insights. You can also change the size and filter actions for your visualization in the tooltip, allowing for a different way to interact within visualizations.
3 – Project Maestro
Data analysts and data scientists are often too familiar with the struggles of data cleaning and wrangling. Tableau’s solution to this issue is a stand-alone application called Project Maestro, aimed towards making the preparation process as easy and painless as possible.
While this product is not in the 10.5 betas, Project Maestro is anticipated to be released this quarter. I was able to experience a live hands-on demo of Project Maestro with the Tableau developers at Tableau Labs and was impressed by the application’s seamless visual and intuitive data prep capabilities.
The application design appears to echo that of the Tableau user interface we are familiar with, in addition to allowing for data wrangling processes in the click of a button and providing data profiling through beautiful visualizations.
Project Maestro is not available yet, but several of the new highly anticipated features, including Hyper and viz in tooltip, are available at last to test here.