Tableau is undoubtedly one of the most popular business intelligence (BI) tools. Teams use Tableau for analysis, reporting, and more often than not, sharing and consuming metrics.
Today, we’re excited to announce our new integration with Tableau. Now you can construct and maintain metrics in MetricFlow*, Transform’s metric framework and bring these metrics into Tableau for analysis through Tableau extracts.
Organizations often use multiple BI tools or a combination of BI tools and other downstream analysis tools. Metric logic is defined differently in all of these tools, leading to mismatched data and confusion around which number is accurate—degrading trust in your data across teams. If you haven’t heard our spiel on why you shouldn’t define metric logic in BI tools: read here. In short, Transform is a metric store that allows you to define your metrics in code and align all downstream tools with the one source of truth.
Transform has two paths for integrating with Tableau. I’ll dig into both of them:
- Use Transform metrics as a data source: Using Tableau’s powerful Hyper API, you can use data from Transform materializations as a published data source.
- Publish extracts with the Tableau Web Data Connector: Create ad-hoc extracts from Transform metrics and publish them to Tableau Server or Online.
Two paths, more flexibility
The first path (using Transform metrics as a Tableau data source) is more tailored towards data engineers and data teams, because they will create these extracts in code in Transform.
Your data teams might work with business users to create a set of materializations that are important to the key teams, but it might not capture all the metrics and dimensions that some users are looking for. This is why we have the second path, which provides an ad-hoc way to get the data you need—for all of your stakeholders.
For more information, explore our documentation.
Path 1: Use Transform metrics as a data source (Hyper API)
Specify Tableau as a destination to your Transform materializations, which automatically creates a Tableau data source from your materialized Transform metrics.
To configure Transform to send your data to Tableau, navigate to Settings → Integrations under Tableau. Choose the first path of integration, and fill in your Tableau site details.
Once you’ve submitted the form, you’re ready to add Tableau as a destination to your materialization. The code will look something like this, which is sending your materialization to Tableau as well as your data warehouse:
Path 2: Publish extracts with the Tableau Web Data Connector (WDC)
The Web Data Connector (WDC) allows you to connect directly to Transform through Tableau Desktop and create an extract. You can also publish these extracts to Server and Online.
Navigate to “Connect to a Server” in Tableau Desktop and find the link for Web Data Connector. Input Transform’s Web Data Connector URL (which you can find under Settings → Integrations under Tableau and in our docs). Authenticate with your API Key and start selecting your metrics and dimensions.
There you have it—consistent metrics across all your Tableau dashboards and views. This is one of several integrations with downstream tools. Explore all of our integrations with other downstream tools (like Google Sheets, Hex, and Mode) in our documentation or product news.
*Editor's Note: The Tableau integration is only available with the Transform metric store, built on top of MetricFlow.
