Tableau Software, the leading analytics platform, announced the general availability of Tableau 2020.2, which delivers a brand new data model that simplifies the analysis of complex data with no coding or scripting skills required. Now it’s even easier for customers to answer complex business questions that span multiple database tables at different levels of detail. The latest release also introduces Metrics, a new mobile-first way for customers to instantly monitor key performance indicators (KPIs). Customers can instantly access these features, as well as brand new connectors for geospatial data, by upgrading to Tableau 2020.2.

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“Now more than ever, organizations need a combination of speed, agility, and empowerment to ensure everyone is able to make data-driven decisions quickly,” said Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer at Tableau Software. “With new data modeling capabilities, Tableau 2020.2 reduces the effort needed to analyze even the most complex datasets and simplifies analysis for anyone, regardless of expertise. In addition, Metrics enables everyone to instantly access the most vital data at their fingertips so they can make better decisions about their business from anywhere.”

Powerful Modeling for Complex Data

Tableau’s new data modeling capabilities make it even easier to analyze data across multiple tables at different levels of detail. With a simple and visual drag-and-drop experience, relationships between tables can be created that automatically create accurate aggregations. This eliminates complex coding and reduces the risk of inaccuracies encountered with traditional database joins. For example, an organization can better plan for expected product return rates in a certain region by relating a table of sales orders with a table of historical returns, through a common zip code ID field. Relationships also make queries more efficient and performant and data sources easier to maintain. To make it easy for anyone to get started analyzing their data, Tableau’s new modern data model will automatically aggregate at the appropriate level of detail for the customer’s analysis.

“With Tableau’s data model improvements we are able to work faster in our COVID-19 analysis. We have COVID-19 case data at a county level, testing data at a date level, and hospital data at an institution level, and we’re overlaying census population data to normalize everything per capita,” said James Smith, Co-Founder & Director at Vantage Information Services Ltd, a leading analytics consultancy. “This would have required multiple join combinations into several disparate data sources to analyze the data, but with the improvements to Tableau’s data model, we can easily relate tables in a single, flexible data source. Looking ahead, the ability to easily combine tables at different levels of granularity will save time and allow us to do more complex analysis.”

Relationships can also bring unprecedented flexibility to make data sources more efficient and accurate, only querying relevant tables to improve dashboard performance. Because multiple levels of detail are preserved in a single data source with industry-standard star and snowflake schema support, customers are able to streamline their data source management process, share combined sources across the organization, and enjoy a more intuitive analytics experience – with fewer distinct data sources for organizations to create and maintain.

“Historically, we have spent a lot of time designing and building underlying data models in our warehouse to optimise for analysis. With relationships, we can seamlessly bring in multiple tables, automatically aggregating at the right level of detail without any calculations or custom SQL, reducing the total number of data sources we need to manage,” said James Baker, global director of business intelligence at JLL, a leading real estate and investment management firm. “Being able to drill down within a single data source is a game-changer and enables lots of possibilities. This will provide our analysts and stakeholders with a much better experience as we’ll be able to get them the data they need in one place where they can explore at different levels of detail.”

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Metrics – KPI Monitoring At Your Fingertips

The introduction of Metrics gives people a simple way to monitor KPIs for their organization, providing a custom, at-a-glance view of the most critical data, streamlined in one location. Easily accessible from the Tableau Mobile app via push notifications or in the browser, Metrics provide a curated and consistent view in an on-the-go format that puts critical insights in the hands of anyone. Metrics eliminates the need for decision-makers to dive deep into multiple dashboards or adjust filters to see the most up-to-date data, and instead offers KPIs in a view as easy to understand as checking a bank account balance.

“Metrics will allow us to easily deliver our most important KPIs, like month-over-month and year-over-year revenue, customer churn, and upgraded or downgraded subscriptions, to our CEO and senior managers,” said Dominik Ruf, data analyst at Enscape, a leading provider of real-time 3D rendering and visualization technology. “Even when they aren’t in the office, Tableau’s Metrics will quickly give them a personalized view right on their phone of the numbers they need to make decisions.”

Additional features in 2020.2 include:

• Esri ArcGIS support: Customers can now visualize their Esri geo-spatial data directly in Tableau. With a simple connection experience, customers can easily solve more location based questions, and make their Esri data more accessible.
• Ask Data improvements: Create custom suggestions to give your users relevant prompts and now use data roles to add consistent semantic context across data sources.
• Advanced Data Management features: Tableau Prep Builder adds a native, direct connection to customer Salesforce data, as well as incremental data refresh to add only new data to a workflow, eliminating the need to refresh an entire data set. Tableau Catalog ensures customers are using the most trusted data with new High Visibility Data Quality Warnings, highlighting the most pressing issues that may impact the accuracy of their data.

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