Get Ready for Tableau Catalog

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If you’re a Tableau administrator or author, your life is going to get a lot easier. For Tableau Server deployments, particularly large ones, managing your data can be complicated. Under the hood, large Tableau deployments integrate data from many sources with varying attributes and quality. Have you ever wondered where your workbooks and worksheets are drawing data from? What is the quality of that data? Or what would happen if you needed to migrate data?

Version 2019.3 will include Tableau Catalog, a new capability of the Data Management Add-on to help you easily see the lineage of your data — which data sources, field attributes and much more. Data owners can automatically track information about the data (i.e., metadata), including data connections, tables and even table columns.

Tableau Catalog also helps build trust in the data across your organization. With data quality warnings, users can quickly see when there’s an issue with data being used in a dashboard — like a missing field or a maintenance interruption. Definitions and additional metadata can be added so users have a better understanding of the data itself. These data details are included alongside your dashboard, making it easy for everyone to feel confident about the data behind their analysis.

On the improved Tableau Server UI, users can see data issue related warnings directly in their dashboards and in the portal.

As part of the VizConnect video series, Tamas Foldi, Starschema CTO and Tableau Zen Master, explains the new features of Tableau Catalog and demonstrates data discovery, lineage and impact analysis, communication about data quality, and developer APIs. Even though this new capability is in beta version, Tamas provides several demos and walks you through these significant improvements to data management in Tableau. Check out the presentation video below.