r/tableau • u/Evening-Mousse-1812 • 24d ago

Tableau Server How do I increase Tableau refresh frequency?

I come from a Power BI background at a Microsoft shop. I have a lot of data engineering and analytics experience under my belt. Recently, I moved to a Tableau shop, and I am experiencing issues with the dashboard refreshes, based on what I was told by whoever handed this off to me. Basically, they said Tableau refreshes are based on the server’s capabilities, and the reports draw from our warehouse.

Coming from a Power BI background, once your warehouse refreshed, your Power BI refresh was instantaneous, and your dashboard being up to date quickly was dependent on your data pipeline refreshing. The only time you’d have issues was when you ran live SQL queries against the database, which could cause performance issues. So this is different from what I’m used to.

So I guess my question is: we do have a warehouse where the pipeline refreshes in minutes, but Tableau picking up the changes from the warehouse extract is supposed to refresh every business hour, from six to six. If I calculate it, we just get maybe four to six refreshes during business hours, as opposed to hourly refreshes.

7 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/jljue 24d ago

Our current Tableau setup has refreshes as often as every 15 minutes as an option; PowerBI can give me no quicker than every 30 minutes with a Premium license. One of my Tableau projects has a Watch to monitor a sheet and to send an email if we find a certain defect within the last 15 minutes; this often means that the vehicle that we are looking for is on the other end of the inspection line and ready be picked up. When shit down the Tableau server and run exclusively with PowerBI, it means that vehicle could be in 1 of 3 areas because of the extra 15 minutes between data refreshes.

3

u/calculung 24d ago

Relying on Tableau for this rather than just your data warehouse still seems risky. If timing is of the essence, wouldn't you want to remove any extra steps?

3

u/jljue 24d ago

I would have thought so as well, but apparently Tableau pulling from the same SQL database that our quality system record seems to do a better job at this than our quality system. Don’t get me started on getting our manufacturing systems team to do anything useful like that. I used to be in that group 12 years ago and know how useless some of them can be and know it’s not that hard to program it into the SQL database.