Tableau and the Enterprise Data Warehouse: The Visual Approach to Business Intelligence

Enterprise data sets are large, detailed, and often complex. For the spreadsheet or typical report recipient looking for the underlying patterns, this is a worst-case combination. Reports are often designed to serve as detailed lookups so they have rows and rows of summarized data, making it difficult to see overall patterns and trends.

Traditional BI applications help by providing graphs, dashboards, and text-based reports. Just as users must be able to ask ad-hoc questions, they also need effective ways of slicing, dicing and interrogating the data; the graph or dashboard that led to yesterday’s insight may not work for today’s problem.

What’s needed is an approach that closes the gap, one that leverages the work of the data steward building the EDW while solving the business intelligence needs of the business user.

Tableau Software is an enlightened solution that can finally deliver on the promise of business intelligence by:

• Using visualization to help people understand data
• Leveraging the Enterprise Data Warehouse
• Enabling ad-hoc data exploration

Tableau solves this problem by providing software that leverages best-practice applications for data visualization and business intelligence. It gives users flexible, easy ways to display data in whatever format makes the patterns most visible.