Boosting Tableau Performance: Strategies for Faster and More Efficient Dashboards
Facing low speed in loading dashboards in Business Intelligence tools can impact users who consume the data and make decisions from the dashboard. As a result, users feel unproductive while waiting for the dashboard to load. Do you face the same issue in your company today? If so, it would be best to revamp your dashboard based on what I will share below.
Why Speed and Performance are Important?
Tableau workbook performance drives speed to insight, analytical flow, and iterative development. Optimizing dashboard performance is one of the most important responsibilities for an analyst. Let’s break this down further:
- Increasing the speed of insight can help make faster and smarter business decisions.
- Keeping analysts in the analytical flow can improve efficiency, leading to high-quality insights and analysis.
- Speeding up performance can reduce dashboard development time.
Now it’s clear that the goal is to help users take faster and smarter business decisions while enabling analysts to provide high-quality insights with less time spent on dashboard development.
Key Questions Before You Start Developing the Dashboard
To achieve that goal, consider the following key questions before you start developing or optimizing the dashboard:
- What is the granularity of the data needed for the dashboard?
- Where is the data source and how is it managed?
- How often does the data need to be updated or refreshed?
- What is the current performance expectation, if any?
These questions significantly impact how the analyst develops a high-speed dashboard.
Understanding Workbook Data Processing Path
There are several processes inside the workbook when analysts build the dashboard. Tableau uses visual query language (VizQL) to generate queries to and from data sources. The data processing path has eight steps.
How to Run Performance Recording in Tableau?
Tableau Desktop includes the performance recording feature to track object load times and identify areas for improvement. Here are the steps to run the performance recording:
- Start from a blank page.
- Click Help, go to Settings & Performance, and choose Start Performance Recording.
- Go to the dashboard that you have developed.
- Repeat step 2, but choose Stop Performance Recording.
Pro Tip: Run your performance recording from a blank page first so that you can get a clean cut of the performance recording. You don’t want anything to render or run a query until you’re ready.
How to Read the Performance Result?
After you stop the performance recording, you will receive a Tableau Read-Only file to see the performance results. Performance summaries include a timeline of events, a sorted list, and any related query details.
From the performance recording summary, we can assume that executing query events take a longer time to consume the data in the dashboard. Long-running queries are usually exacerbated by high data volume, complex functions, and view-level calculations like table calculations.
To help with long-executing queries, you can specify filter fields, remove only relevant values from your filters, replace normal filters with parameters, and set actions.
Conclusion Workbook Performance Factors
There are four internal factors that affect the dashboard performance, including Data Design, Filtering, Calculation, and Layout & Visuals.
Data design is the first factor and also represents the biggest opportunity for performance enhancement. Data design can represent the volume of the data and source of filtering. Filtering, Calculation, and Layout & Visuals also affect dashboard performance to varying degrees.
It would be best to check first how much time the dashboard takes to load your data using performance recording and get the number as the estimated time that stakeholders will face. In the next phase, you can tune the dashboard performance and inform the stakeholders that the dashboard has been optimized from X to Y seconds.
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