Connecting to data sources
One of the beauties of Tableau is the ease with which you can connect to many different data sources in various ways. As mentioned earlier in this book, there are many connectors defined in Tableau for interfacing with a variety of data sources. Furthermore, this flexibility extends beyond simply connecting to single tables or files.
Although Tableau makes it easy to connect to various data sources, it should be stressed that Tableau is not an Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) tool. If complex joins and complex data blending are required to generate useful results, it may be advisable to perform ETL work outside of Tableau, for example, in Tableau Prep Builder (see Chapter 3, Tableau Prep Builder, for more information on this service). ETL work will ideally lead to better data modeling and thus easier authoring and quicker performance in Tableau.
The four ways in which Tableau connects to data are as follows:
- Tableau may...
