Announcing the Tableau Integration for Datafold Cloud

We're excited to introduce the new Datafold Cloud Tableau Integration, bringing column-level lineage and impact analysis directly to your BI tool.

With the Tableau integration in Datafold Cloud, your team will have unmatched visibility into Tableau assets, including Tableau Data Sources, Sheets, and Dashboards, that may be impacted or changed by your dbt and transformation code updates. This valuable information is easily accessible through Datafold Cloud's comprehensive column-level lineage and the robust Datafold CI comment. By utilizing this information, your team can start identifying data quality issues before your stakeholders even notice.

"Datafold Cloud's Tableau integration allows us to easily see the impact of [dbt] modeling changes. Before when we needed to see where a model was used in Tableau, it was a mixture of metadata analysis and guessing game. Now with Datafold Cloud's Tableau integration, it's a super simple process that tells us the exact Datasource and Sheet that implement that model. Ultimately, Datafold Cloud's Tableau integration has reduced the uncertainty and amount of time it took to see downstream model usage."
‍
- Tim Runyan, Data Engineering Manager at Seismic

Building order in Tableau and closing the gap between transformation work and your BI tools

We built the Datafold Cloud Looker integration for one primary reason: there exists a real gap between the transformation code logic (typically stored in a dbt project) and your BI tool. It’s only after dbt or other transformation code has already been merged into production do you receive that "something looks off in my dashboard" message from a key stakeholder.

And at Datafold, we don’t think data teams should wait until a stakeholder catches an error—they should know exactly how their code changes will impact downstream dbt models and BI tool assets before that code is merged into production.

‍

We also recognize that Tableau, like any other BI tool, can become a bit of the wild west as your organization and data scales. Dashboards start popping up out of nowhere, custom SQL queries are driving more reporting than you would like, and data governance and management increasingly becomes a challenge. Because the dbt DAG does not integrate with your BI tool, and Tableau itself offers a simplified lineage look within Tableau itself, we realized that a solution that solves real problems for data teams should include:

(a) An encompassing view between a data team’s transformation logic and their business’s BI tool, and

(b) Column-level lineage, so you have the greatest transparency into how your data makes its way through your system

The Datafold Cloud Tableau Integration exists to solve these problems. The new integration specifically enables:

• Tableau Data Sources, Sheets, and Dashboards to be accessible in Datafold Cloud’s column-level lineage, so you can trace your data throughout your data’s entire ecosystem.
• Potentially impacted Tableau assets are automatically added to Datafold Cloud’s data diff PR comment, so you and your team know exactly which BI assets will change with your code updates.

With the Tableau integration for Datafold Cloud by your side, you can make transformation code changes with confidence, develop next-level transparency into your Tableau project, and ensure incorrect data never reaches the hands of your business users.

"The new Datafold Cloud Tableau Integration will allow Eventbrite Data Platform Engineers and Analytics Engineers better understand the impact of changes or removals of specific tables and columns in our data warehouse on stakeholder-facing Tableau dashboards. This means we now can have more confidence in moving quickly in deprecating legacy datasets and creating newer ones!"

- Rob Goretsky, Principal Data Engineer at Eventbrite

📽️ Watch it in-action

Watch Datafold Solutions Engineer Sung Won Chung demo how the new Tableau integration works.

Did someone say more BI tools?

As we continue to enhance Datafold Cloud and provide you with the utmost visibility into your data's ecosystem, movement, and impact, look forward to the following innovations:

• More BI tool integrations, such as Power BI, to ensure that different internal teams with different tooling have a consistent understanding of data lineage and impact.
• A robust notification system via Slack and email that automatically informs stakeholders about dbt and transformation code changes that will impact their Tableau assets of interest.

Getting started

If you’re ready for transparency and impact analysis in your Tableau project, here are some resources to help you get started:

• Existing Datafold Cloud users who use Tableau can contact their solutions team at Datafold to set up the integration. For more details, check out our documentation.
• If you're interested in gaining a deeper understanding of your data's lineage and identifying data quality issues before they affect your Tableau instance, reach out to the Datafold team today to explore what this could look like for your organization.
• Join us for the next Datafold Cloud Demo Day to see the integration live in action!

Happy diffing!