Tableau Prep - A Self Service Analytics Data Prep Tool

Tableau Data Prep offers a lot of inbuilt features and is more intuitive than a lot of people give it credit for. This became clear to me after completing a course on it recently. I would like to share the gist of my findings here.

Tableau is a self-service data preparation tool that citizen data scientists may use for mostly doing ad hoc data preparation.

Tableau Data Prep is similar to tools like Informatica and Pentaho in terms of layout but more accessible. I judge it to be well suited for citizen data scientists who do not have much experience with sophisticated ETL tools like Informatica, Pentaho or SQL.

 This tool can take input from a variety of sources like all popular databases (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, etc.), Big Data (Cloudera Hadoop, Hortonworks Hadoop Hive, MapR Hadoop Hive, etc.), Datawarehouse’s (Teradata, Snowflake, etc), and in formats like csv, excel etc.

 All common data preparation like Aggregate, Pivot, Join, Union, etc. can be done effortlessly with the click of a mouse.

 A lot of features like field split based on delimiter, automatics field split, calculated field, etc. are supported, giving the tool a broad spectrum of application.

One feature I particularly appreciate is the Pictorial Data Profiling tool as shown below. You can easily see the type of join being performed and the data being produced as the outcome of the join.

However, apart from CVS, Tableau Data Extract (. hyper) and Tableau data Extract ( .tde) no other output is supported.

 The main focus appears to be an easy to use Self Service Data prep tool for the Citizen Data Scientist who does data analysis using Tableau Desktop.

 All considered, I liked the intuitiveness and accessibility of the tool and enjoyed learning about it.

Edit on 04-Sep-2020:

With Tableau Prep 2020.3, Now Write to Databases is there. This makes this tool much more useful. With Tableau 2020.3, writing to external databases will be available to seven mainstream relational databases, with more databases planned for future releases.

The databases available for the 2020.3 release are Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Snowflake, Teradata, and Amazon Redshift.

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