Work with a variety of data, including XML

An important application of Hadoop and Hive is the ability to work with a variety of data, such as XML files. This often means that you need to unpack nested data, perform data transformations, and process URLs. Tableau supports a number of new string functions when working with Hive and Hadoop, including URL processing, regular expressions, and hex/binary numeric operators. Here, we’re using the “XPATH” function to create a city field so that we can represent this data in a more traditional, relational way. XML functions are exposed in the Tableau calculations window when you’re working with Hive/Hadoop data so you don’t need to do custom programming to work with XML objects.