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Overview

Our Tableau integration can help you visualise column-level lineage dependencies between warehouse tables and Tableau entities using Data Explorer.

Lineage from upstream data warehouses into Tableau is supported for the following data warehouse types:

  • Snowflake
  • Redshift
  • Databricks
  • BigQuery

Potentially impacted Tableau entity names are also automatically identified in the Datafold CI printout.

The following Tableau entities types will appear in Data Explorer, data diff results, and the Datafold CI printout:

  • Tableau Data Connections and related fields;
  • Workbooks and related fields;
  • Dashboards.

note

To declutter

the Datafold lineage, Datafold filters out Tableau Data Connections and Data Connections fields that have no downstream dependencies.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Datafold integration, please reach out to our team.

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Set up your Tableau instance

To connect Datafold to Tableau, you will require the following credentials from your Tableau site:

  • Server URL,
  • Site Name,
  • Token Name,
  • Token Value.

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If you are using Tableau Server

Tableau Server is an installation of Tableau that you are managing on your company’s own infrastructure and domain. This is an alternative to using a Tableau Cloud subscription.

tsm maintenance metadata-services enable
  • Ensure that your Tableau Server instance is accessible to Datafold. Please get in touch with our team to set this up.

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Obtaining server URL & Site Name

These can be found from URL of your Tableau home page. For instance, if your home page is:

https://eu-west-1a.online.tableau.com/#/site/mysupersite/home

Then:

  • Server URL is https://eu-west-1a.online.tableau.com (the hostname with https in front)
  • Site Name is mysupersite (the part directly after #/site/ and until the next /)

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Obtaining Token Name & Token Value

Ensure that Personal Access Tokens are enabled on your Tableau site. For that, navigate to Settings and there, on the General tab, search for Personal Access Tokens. That feature needs to be enabled — not necessarily for everyone but for the user for whom we will be creating the token Datafold will use.

Enable Personal Access Tokens

Now that Personal Access Tokens are enabled, click on your user’s avatar in the top right, choose My Account Settings in the pop-up menu, and then search for Personal Access Tokens on your settings page.

Personal Access Token

Input a desired name, say datafold, into the Token Name field, and click Create Token.

This will open a popup window. Click Copy Secret and save the copied value somewhere — you will use this when setting up Datafold. You can read more about personal access tokens on the official Tableau documentation here.

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Create a Tableau Integration

Navigate to

Settings → Integrations → Data Apps. Click

Add new integration.

Add New Integration

A click on Tableau will lead you to the integration creation screen. Fill in the fields with data we obtained earlier. See the screenshot for hints.

Tableau Integration Settings

…and click Save.

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What’s next?

The initial sync might take some time; it depends on the number of objects at your Tableau site. Eventually, Tableau entities — Data Connections, Workbooks, and Dashboards should appear at your Lineage tab.

TIP

Tracking Jobs explains how to find out when your data app integration is ready.

Search Tableau Entities

Clicking on a Tableau entity will lead you to the Lineage screen:

Tableau Lineage Screen

TIP

As you might have noticed on the screenshots above, Datafold does not display Tableau Sheets. Instead, we group, and deduplicate, all Fields of all Sheets within a Workbook and display them as Fields of the Workbook.

On the screenshot directly above, Demo Workbook might include one Sheet with Created At field and another with Sub Plan field, but for our purposes we unite all of those fields beneath the Workbook — which makes the Lineage graph much less cluttered, and much easier to browse

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I changed something in Tableau — but Datafold does not reflect my changes

Datafold relies on Tableau API to retrieve information about Tableau data model. Due to caching, Tableau API might be a bit late to reflect a recently introduced change. If your changes are not being displayed at Datafold, please wait for a few hours — and they should appear

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