As the recent post on Vertica brings to light, sometimes really highly performing systems need a little configuration to perform optimally with Tableau. There’s a particular set of systems that require some extra thought and care to use with Tableau, because if you set off without any planning and expect to combine Tableau’s ease of use with the speed of these systems and end up staring at the “query executing” screen for 10 minutes, you may start to doubt everyone’s claims.
The systems I’m talking about are the Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) databases. There’s already a great explanation of them here so I’m not going to go too deeply into how they work, other than what is relevant for Tableau. Which systems that Tableau supports are MPP (don’t get too angry if I get this a bit wrong) (in no particular order):
- Teradata
- Vertica
- Redshift
- Neteeza
- Greenplum
- EXASOL
- Aster (although there is some Hadoop going on in the backend)
- ParAccel
Tableau and Behold! 