Centrally manage access with our upgraded Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse connector

With more than 65 native connectors, Tableau is always working to bring data closer to our customers, while making it easier for IT to enable and manage data access. So, we are excited to announce that with Tableau 2019.2, we’ve upgraded our direct connection to Microsoft’s Azure SQL Data Warehouse to include support for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) username and password authentication.

For larger enterprises with strict authentication requirements, this update will make data access management simpler. IT can now employ central ID management, using Azure AD for authentication with Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

Customers love Tableau’s partnership with Microsoft, as evidenced by Microsoft SQL Server being Tableau’s most commonly used data source. And as many companies are shifting to the cloud, customers can further leverage Tableau and Microsoft investments thanks to this new connector, first introduced with Tableau 2019.1.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a cloud-based enterprise data warehouse that takes advantage of massively parallel processing (MPP)—similar to the technology used by databases like Vertica and Teradata—which helps efficiently execute complex queries across petabytes of data.

As businesses grow, there is an increasing need to visualize and query every single piece of data, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse can help customers query hundreds of millions of rows at a lightning-fast rate. Prior to Tableau 2019.1, customers could connect to Azure SQL Data Warehouse through Tableau’s Microsoft SQL Server connector. This new connection offers customers a robust, finely-tuned connection to see and understand their data housed in Microsoft’s fully-managed cloud service.

The benefit Azure SQL Data Warehouse provides to customers is the ability to scale performance and resources independently through Microsoft’s Data Warehouse Units (DWUs). That means customers only pay for the computing resources they need, when they need them. Azure SQL Data Warehouse also stores data into relational tables with columnar storage, significantly reducing the data storage costs and improving query performance.

Here is a demo of Tableau against Azure SQL Data Warehouse. We’re exploring New York City Citibike data from 2018, analyzing hundreds of millions of individual trips. For this demo, we had Azure SQL Data Warehouse set to 500 DWUs—in the lower mid-range of the performance band.

Give the Azure SQL Data Warehouse connector a try, and let us know what you think.

The following tutorial can help you get your own Azure SQL Data Warehouse up and running: Azure SQL DW Tutorial. Please note: This tutorial only addresses local authentication.

If you are running your infrastructure and applications in Azure today, remember that Tableau Server is certified to run in Azure—you can run your entire BI and analytics platform seamlessly in the Azure cloud.