Tableau Your Data!: Fast and Easy Visual Analysis with Tableau Software

CHAPTER 9

Installing Tableau Server

The more you have in your cup, the more likely people are to want a drink.

SETH GODIN¹

In the first eight chapters you learned how to use Tableau to connect to data, analyze data, visualize data, and build dashboards. Chapters 9, 10, and 11 are about installing, managing, and maintaining Tableau's information sharing products. Tableau provides three different tools for sharing information—Tableau Public, Tableau Online, and Tableau Server.

Tableau Public is a free cloud-hosted service aimed at bloggers, students, or data visualization enthusiasts that want to share their work publically. It is not designed for enterprise environments that require data security. In fact, anything published on Tableau Public is freely available for anyone to download. This tool is generally not used in enterprise environments that need to control access to the information.

Tableau Server is for customers that need to control where and how the data is stored and managed. It can be installed on hardware behind your firewall or on cloud services that you contract with directly. You can license it by named-user, or based on the server hardware that is installed.

Tableau Online (released in 2013) is another cloud-based information sharing environment (managed by Tableau Software) that provides data security without the need for installing any software or managing hardware. Your data is stored in a secure environment managed by Tableau Software. To start using Tableau ...