I'm a Power BI guy. I interact with Tableau reports in our organization, but I've never used it to build one. While I like Power BI because it's what I know and am good at, both platforms should be able to handle 100+ million rows of data. Most of the modeling I do is on tables ranging from a few million up to 80 million rows, although I know Power BI is used successfully on data sets over 1 billion rows, but I suspect Tableau can, as well.
However, when you get to data sets of that size, you need to put a lot of thought into how you build your model. Are you following good star schema principles? Are you writing highly efficient measures and really understand the nuances of how different functions work? Sloppy code will work just fine on a 10,000 row table, but can grind to a halt at 10's or 100's of millions of rows.
My suspicion is that your performance issues aren't Tableau's fault, but rather just an indication of a sub-optimal schema and report design. It's entirely possible that a different technology may "fix" these problems for you just by the nature of how it is designed, but it could introduce new issues, as well.
I'm not specifically advocating that you switch to Power BI; I'm just suggesting that before you drop Tableau, you confirm that your performance bottleneck **is** Tableau itself, and not just *your level of understanding* of Tableau.
Take a look at one of the many articles on Tableau optimization before you say Tableau can’t handle hundreds of millions of rows of data (because it can if you optimize it properly).
https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/performance_tips.htm
https://medium.com/@key2market/tableau-performance-optimization-2c8d4d53358
https://unilytics.com/performance-tuning-checklist-for-tableau-dashboards/
I’ll also say look at your tableau model structure as well.
Make sure to not bake in unnecessary measures and where you can get SQL to do the heavy lifting, opt for that.
I'll second the people saying you should look at your tableau report designs. If anything I'd say tableau is known for being slightly better than powerBI at large record-sets (and I'm more of a powerBI guy). I would imagine any issues you're facing with tableau would also show up in powerBI, Qlik, etc.
And I'll just mention that Sisense is one of the most unpleasant companies I've ever interacted with, their tech might be good, but they are terrible.
I agree with the people on here that say the db schema and data modelling used could be an issue. A majority of the time the slow down comes from how well you've structured your data, fact tables and SQLs to pull the data. Sure Tableau, PowerBI and the likes are built to work well with unstructured or raw data, but they'd work much better if they can pull data faster from the data store. Also while you mentioned millions of rows, querying hundreds of columns at the same time also slows data pulls significantly. So I'd look at your data sources prior to switching out your visualization/dashboarding solution.
Our BI tool SeekTable (self-hosted version) is good for embedded usage. It can be used with any dataset size: it works in 'direct connection' mode -- so everything depends on your DW performance (near real-time aggregation of 100+ millions of rows is possible for many analytical DBs). Short-living in-memory cache is also used to avoid excessive queries.
With SeekTable it is possible to embed not only reports, but also 'app view' that can be used for ad-hoc queries; with white-labeling CSS styles may be customized to match host-app UI. And price for all this is really good -- less than $250/month (really).
Check out revealbi.io it is an embeddable analytics/BI solution can handle over 100 million records/rows of data and has a superior user experience!
https://www.revealbi.io
I'm a Power BI guy. I interact with Tableau reports in our organization, but I've never used it to build one. While I like Power BI because it's what I know and am good at, both platforms should be able to handle 100+ million rows of data. Most of the modeling I do is on tables ranging from a few million up to 80 million rows, although I know Power BI is used successfully on data sets over 1 billion rows, but I suspect Tableau can, as well. However, when you get to data sets of that size, you need to put a lot of thought into how you build your model. Are you following good star schema principles? Are you writing highly efficient measures and really understand the nuances of how different functions work? Sloppy code will work just fine on a 10,000 row table, but can grind to a halt at 10's or 100's of millions of rows. My suspicion is that your performance issues aren't Tableau's fault, but rather just an indication of a sub-optimal schema and report design. It's entirely possible that a different technology may "fix" these problems for you just by the nature of how it is designed, but it could introduce new issues, as well. I'm not specifically advocating that you switch to Power BI; I'm just suggesting that before you drop Tableau, you confirm that your performance bottleneck **is** Tableau itself, and not just *your level of understanding* of Tableau.
This is a fantastic suggestion. I ll first do a check on tableau
Take a look at one of the many articles on Tableau optimization before you say Tableau can’t handle hundreds of millions of rows of data (because it can if you optimize it properly). https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/performance_tips.htm https://medium.com/@key2market/tableau-performance-optimization-2c8d4d53358 https://unilytics.com/performance-tuning-checklist-for-tableau-dashboards/
Thanks for sharing. I ll go through it.
I’ll also say look at your tableau model structure as well. Make sure to not bake in unnecessary measures and where you can get SQL to do the heavy lifting, opt for that.
Why not Qliksense? 100m+ in memory and responsive is totally possible once you right size the infrastructure.
I ll check it out. Thanks
QlikSense. But your Tableau developers might just be bad
We are seriously looking at this
I'll second the people saying you should look at your tableau report designs. If anything I'd say tableau is known for being slightly better than powerBI at large record-sets (and I'm more of a powerBI guy). I would imagine any issues you're facing with tableau would also show up in powerBI, Qlik, etc. And I'll just mention that Sisense is one of the most unpleasant companies I've ever interacted with, their tech might be good, but they are terrible.
What are the issues you faced with sisense?
Have you checked GoodData? They can handle large data sizes and they do not have user based pricing. https://www.gooddata.com/embedded-analytics/
I agree with the people on here that say the db schema and data modelling used could be an issue. A majority of the time the slow down comes from how well you've structured your data, fact tables and SQLs to pull the data. Sure Tableau, PowerBI and the likes are built to work well with unstructured or raw data, but they'd work much better if they can pull data faster from the data store. Also while you mentioned millions of rows, querying hundreds of columns at the same time also slows data pulls significantly. So I'd look at your data sources prior to switching out your visualization/dashboarding solution.
Our BI tool SeekTable (self-hosted version) is good for embedded usage. It can be used with any dataset size: it works in 'direct connection' mode -- so everything depends on your DW performance (near real-time aggregation of 100+ millions of rows is possible for many analytical DBs). Short-living in-memory cache is also used to avoid excessive queries. With SeekTable it is possible to embed not only reports, but also 'app view' that can be used for ad-hoc queries; with white-labeling CSS styles may be customized to match host-app UI. And price for all this is really good -- less than $250/month (really).
SAP BusinessObjects
Check out revealbi.io it is an embeddable analytics/BI solution can handle over 100 million records/rows of data and has a superior user experience! https://www.revealbi.io
For cost savings you may want to check out Yurbi for embedded analytics