Now in beta: Write to database with Tableau Prep and grant license on sign in

The Tableau 2020.3 beta is here with powerful functionality to help scale your analytics in your organization, making data more accessible to everyone. Here’s a quick overview of the highlights:

• Write to database with Tableau Prep Builder — Prep users, we’ve got you covered. We’ve added the ability to write prepared data from Tableau Prep to a database, enabling you to govern and scale your prepared data both inside and outside of Tableau.
• Grant license on sign in — Site admins can now designate active directory groups that are automatically granted a site license and role when they initially sign in to their site on Tableau Server or Tableau Online. This helps you more effectively manage licensing at the group level.

And, stay tuned for a new connection to Datorama’s integrated and harmonized marketing data.

• Datorama connection — Marketing departments will soon be able to seamlessly publish a data source from Datorama to Tableau Online and Tableau Server.

Let’s take a deeper look at some of the biggest features in this release.

Since our launch of Tableau Prep, we’ve continued to invest in features to enhance self-service data preparation. Tableau Prep users now have the power to prepare and write data to database tables both in the cloud with Amazon Redshift or Snowflake, or with on-premises databases like Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL or MySQL. With this functionality, you can leverage your existing investments in databases and governance policies, making clean, prepared data immediately available for analysis in Tableau or potential other analytical and data science use cases.

While writing to databases can often be a complex and time-consuming task, Tableau Prep Builder simplifies the process for both analysts and advanced users alike, whether you’re creating a new data table or adding data to an existing one. Just like you’d expect from Tableau, you get a visual and direct field mapping experience to ensure the right fields are properly mapped to the right data. Additionally, you can feel confident you won’t corrupt or lose data in the process—Tableau automatically loads the data into a temporary table before merging it into the final table, ensuring the data has completely loaded.

Write to database is fully integrated with the rest of the Tableau platform, and in particular, Tableau Catalog (part of Tableau Data Management). With this integration, the tables, as well as any descriptions added to the columns, are immediately included in the lineage and impact analysis, so there’s a shared understanding of the data between the person who has prepared it and those who are consuming or analyzing it. Finally, any newly created tables are available in the Tableau Server and Tableau Online search, and in the connect to data experiences in both Tableau Desktop and web authoring—making these new tables more easily discoverable and accessible.

Starting in Tableau 2020.3, site admins can now designate members—specific individuals, teams and departments, or even your entire organization—to be automatically granted a license and site role (Viewer, Explorer, Creator) upon their first time logging in to their Tableau Online or Tableau Server account. Admins can assign roles for users and groups before they login for the first time, so they’re automatically granted a seat. This removes the user’s need to request a license before using Tableau, and helps admins eliminate the time-consuming task of manually issuing one-off Tableau licenses.

Grant license on sign in allows you to build new designated groups and works with existing groups for maximum flexibility to keep admins in control of deploying Tableau seats across the organization. It's paramount that your organization can deploy Tableau at scale quickly to optimize your seat investment and scale up to get the most value out of Tableau.

For business users, getting a license becomes as easy as signing in—there is no longer the need to submit a ticket to their IT department or wait through a potentially lengthy approval process. For IT admins, managing licenses becomes a much simpler experience—site roles can be configured once and do not require any manual licensing.

With the new Datorama integration with Tableau, marketers will be able to leverage Datorama’s powerful data integration, modeling, and harmonization of marketing data to create one data set—a single source of truth. Tableau users can then explore this data source to optimize spend and performance across marketing channels. From Datorama, simply publish tuned marketing sets directly to Tableau Online and Tableau Server. Your teams can then download the data extract as a .hyper file for exploration in Tableau Desktop. Tableau users will be able to easily access and merge this data with other data sources across the enterprise to drive greater insights. Note: The connection to Datorama is not part of the Tableau 2020.3 beta. Stay tuned for updates.

We’re working hard to get Tableau 2020.3 out the door, but we need your input first! We invite you to give us feedback so we can identify any issues and ensure the highest quality for these new features. Features included in beta and in the final version of Tableau 2020.3 may change over time as we complete beta testing.

Join the Tableau pre-release community to:

• Participate in alpha and beta programs for early access to new features, versions, and products.
• Engage directly with the Tableau development team through user research, product discussions, and feedback activities around topics you care about.