Difference between data blending and data joining for reports and dashboards

If someone does commendable work it should be appreciated, which I experienced with my BI team. I met them yesterday to review the reports and dashboard.? I was surprised to see my team reports’ results. They have used data blending and data joining quite intelligently in their reporting and dashboard.?

The team wants to use various data sources for reporting, including Excel files, Oracle, SQL Server & Snowflakes. My creative team made excellent use of Data Blending & Joining in this scenario.?

Team used data joining when they wanted to join data between two or more tables or sheets. I questioned our BI team about the differences between data blending and data joining, and they gave me some astute explanations:

Difference between Data blending and Data Joining ?

• Data blending is a technique for integrating data that adds columns of data from one data source to a table of data from another.??
• Data blending simulates a traditional left join. The main difference between the two is when the aggregation is performed. A join combines the data and then aggregates. A blend aggregates and then combines the data.?
• When you use a left join to combine data, a query is sent to the database where the join is performed. A left join returns all rows from the left table and any corresponding rows from the right table. The results of the join are then sent back to Tableau and aggregated for display in the visualization.?
• When you use data blending to combine data, a query is sent to the database for each data source that is used on the sheet. The results of the queries are sent back to Tableau as aggregated data and presented together in the visualization.?
• Data blending occurs on a sheet-by sheet basis.?
• Blending requires primary and secondary data sources. The order in which fields are used determines which data source is the primary versus the secondary data source.?
• Blended data sources cannot be published as a unit. Instead, publish each data source separately (to the same server) and then blend the published data sources.?

I appreciate my team for providing me with this kind of information and a clear explanation of why Data Blending differs from Data Joins in Tableau. It has enabled to use Tableau to generate a viz using data from database sources.??

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