I got a question the other day asking whether using an extracted data source on Tableau Server is the same as using a published data source. Good question! The difficulty I had explaining this led me to create the following explanation:
- Publishing a data source affects how the data is accessed
- Extracting a data source affects where data is located
The first thing you normally do when you create a new Tableau Desktop workbook is connect to data. You may connect to data in Excel, a relational database like Microsoft SQL, an online data source like Google Analytics, etc. In each case, the information required is different: path, file name, tab for Excel; server, username, password, database, and table for Microsoft SQL; username, password, account, property, profile, date range, dimensions, measures, segment for Google Analytics; etc. If you are providing data access to analysts, this is probably more than you want to manage.
Instead of having your users connect to different data sources, you can instead publish them to Tableau Server. In effect, you are using Tableau Server as a proxy: users connect to Tableau Server and behind the scenes Tableau Server retrieves the data from the original source. This method of providing data access not only simplifies access for the users, it combines and reduces user administration to a single location (Tableau Server), and it allows you as the administrator to present consistent field names and calculations to users independent of the original data source.
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| Publishing a Data Source to Tableau Server |
While publishing a data source makes it easier for users to access data and administrators to manage it, extracts are typically done to make data access faster and reduce database load. When you extract data using Tableau Desktop, it makes an local copy of the data that's optimized for analysis. If the workbook is published, Tableau Server gets a copy of the data which it can refresh from the original data source.
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| Using Data Extracts |
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