Dramatically speed up your Tableau visualizations with EXASOL

Tableau is one of the best Business Intelligence and Data Visualization software in the market today. Its game changing drag-and-drop, self-service experience is unparalleled and it is popularly used worldwide.

Tableau is highly optimized and works quite fast in many applications but in applications where you need to read large volumes of data, like hundreds of millions or billions of rows, it can get dramatically slow (yes there are some illustrations of Tableau with large datasets but they are very isolated, single report demos and in a real life dashboard things can get pretty slow if you need to reaf more than 100 million rows).

Tableau is aware of this problem so back in March 2016, they have purchased HyPer, a high performance database system initially developed as a research project at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Unfortunately, they did not release any plan for the availability of HyPer yet.

Luckily, there is already a solution out there, more established and powerful than HyPer. The solution is Exasol.

EXASOL analytic database management software is currently the fastest, in-memory analytic database in the world. Since 2008 EXASOL led the Transaction Processing Performance Council's TPC-H benchmark for analytical scenarios, in all data volume-based categories 100 GB, 300 GB, 1 TB, 3 TB, 10 TB, 30 TB and 100 TB.

If you are using Tableau’s great BI, reporting and visualization software to see and understand your data, but are struggling with performance, then you need EXASOL. Using EXASOL as the analytic engine to power your Tableau front-end tool means that you will be able to accelerate your reporting and visualizations dramatically.

You can see Exasol in action below. Note that, Tableau already has a native connection to Exasol.

Exasol does one thing and one thing extremely well. Its high-performance, in-memory, MPP database is specifically designed for in-memory analytics. Exasol analytic database achieves lightning-fast performance with linear scalability by combining in-memory technology, columnar compression and storage, and massively parallel processing.

Since 2014, EXASOL has maintained its position as the undisputed leader in TPC-H benchmarks.  From data volumes that range from 100GB right up to 100TB, EXASOL holds the number one position - by a significant margin - over other solutions, for both raw performance and price-performance.

Exasol also offers out-of-the-box support for R, Python, Java and Lua. EXASOL also allows you to integrate the analytics programming language of your choice and use it for in-database analytics. It can easily connect to your existing SQL-based BI, reporting and data integration tools via ODBC, JDBC, .NET as well as a JSON-based web socket API.

Tableau has acquired HyPer high performance database system

Tableau has announced the acquisition of HyPer, in-memory, high performance database system designed for simultaneous, high performance OLTP and OLAP processing.

Hyper high-performance database system will be integrated into Tableau’s product offerings and bring a host of new capabilities to Tableau customers such as faster analysis of large data sizes, richer analytics, enhanced data integration and data transformation as well as support for semi-structured and unstructured data.

Tableau is highly optimized and works quite fast in many applications but in applications where you need to read large volumes of data, like hundreds of millions or billions of rows, it can get dramatically slow (yes there are some illustrations of Tableau with large datasets but they are very isolated, single report demos and in a real life dashboard things can get pretty slow if you need to reaf more than 100 million rows). There are some other tools also available in the market with native Tableau data connections. Most notable and famous of these is EXASOL in-memory analytic database management software.

Like Tableau, HyPer grew out of a research project. started in 2010 by professors Dr. Thomas Neumann and Dr. Alfons Kemper, chair of at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) Database Group. Four of the project’s Ph.D. students, Tobias Muehlbauer, Wolf Roediger, Viktor Leis and Jan Finis, will join the Tableau family, focused on integrating Hyper into Tableau products.[1]

Here is a detailed definition of Tableau's new HyPer in the project website :

"HyPer is a main-memory-based relational DBMS for mixed OLTP and OLAP workloads. It is a so-called all-in-one New-SQL database system that entirely deviates from classical disk-based DBMS architectures by introducing many innovative ideas including machine code generation for data-centric query processing and multi-version concurrency control, leading to exceptional performance. HyPer’s OLTP throughput is comparable or superior to dedicated transaction processing systems and its OLAP performance matches the best query processing engines — however, HyPer achieves this OLTP and OLAP performance simultaneously on the same database state. Current research focuses on extending HyPer’s functionality beyond OLTP and OLAP processing to exploratory workflows that are deeply integrated into the database kernel by utilizing HyPer’s pioneering compilation infrastructure."[2]

[1] - Welcome, Hyper team, to the Tableau community!
[2] - http://hyper-db.com/