Tableau and Hadoop on Big Data: When Elephants Rule Again

Huong Nguyen, QA Engineer at Tableau, sent these notes after watching Abhi Mehta of Tresata and Robert Morton of Tableau discuss big data, Hadoop, and Tableau.

When Elephants Rule introduces the Apache Hadoop/Hive from Cloudera connector to Tableau.

The session was split into 2 parts, with Abhishek doing a really great job explaining what Hadoop is for those of us not familiar with it, and why this is such an exciting addition to Tableau. As a customer himself, he showed several examples of what Tersata was doing with Tableau and this Hive connectivity.

Abhi Mehta of Tresata on Hadoop and the power of big data.

One of the most powerful examples of working with big data was showing home pricing data, and then drilling down to the state, county, city, neighborhood, and finally the street level while retaining the rich visualization and data presentation. After really hyping up the promise that Hadoop brings, he handed it off to Robert to do a live demo of Tableau working with Hive.

Robert connected live to the Tableau Hadoop cluster in Seattle to show just how easy it was. He then worked through ingesting the data and how Tableau really does treat Apache Hadoop from Cloudera like any other data source with full measures and dimensions handling. He then showed how Tableau automatically translates the requests into SQL, and how once the data has been serverd up by Hadoop, how quickly Tableau can work with it. He also showed some of the power of the connector by working with some more difficult cases of XML data with nested data and custom SQL.
Here's an earlier recording of Robert's same Tableau and Hadoop demo.

Robert Morton of Tableau having a glass of wine with his wife (but in this session, discussing Tableau's integration with Apache Hadoop from Cloudera.)