Databricks can consistently analyze enormous amounts of data, as well as construct scalable Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects and Data Warehousing capabilities. With Collaborative Notebooks, Machine Learning Runtime, and managed ML Flow, Databricks provides a complete Data Science workspace.
It has the unrivaled benefit of being built on a mature distributed Big Data processing and AI-enabled platform that can integrate with practically any technology. Tableau is a visual analytics engine that simplifies the creation of interactive visual analytics in the form of dashboards. These dashboards facilitate the conversion of data into intelligible, interactive visualizations for non-technical analysts and end-users.
In this article, you will gain information about Databricks Tableau Connection. You will also gain a holistic understanding of Tableau, Databricks, their key features, and the steps involved in setting up Databricks Tableau Connection. Read along to find out in-depth information about Databricks Tableau Connection.
Table of Contents
What is Tableau?
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Tableau is a pioneer in the Business Intelligence software technology industry that enables any person from any part of the world, irrespective of their professional background to derive valuable insights from data and build visualizations. Tableau is widely known for its intuitive and interactive visualizations.
Tableau also empowers users with minimal technical expertise to exploit all of its advanced analytical features. Tableau is available for everyone as a completely managed Cloud-based service called Tableau Online and as an On-Premise Server-based deployment called Tableau Server.
Tableau also houses a gamut of supporting applications to help the users make the best use of Tableau Server and Tableau Online. Tableau Prep Builder will assist you to connect to as many Data Sources as you need and helps you to prepare your data for analysis through cleansing.
Tableau Prep Conductor will allow you to schedule jobs for your Dashboards and Reports. You can also monitor all your work on Tableau and get debugging information.
Key Features of Tableau
Tableau is a powerful tool and is widely used by a lot of industries. To understand Tableau better let’s look at some of its key features:
1) Supports Multiple Data Sources
Since every task is performed on data in Tableau, it allows you to integrate your data from a large variety of data sources:
- Microsoft Excel
- CSV files
- MS SQL Server
- Oracle
- IBM DB2
- Google BigQuery
- Windows Azure
- ODBC/JDBC, etc
You can make use of these integrations to stream your data to Tableau and analyze it seamlessly.
2) Houses a Wide Range of Visualizations
Tableau also provides a large number of simple tools for its users (both technical and non-technical people) and empowers them to create different types of visualizations using their data. You can use these tools and create simple or complex visualizations using Tableau. Its key visualizations include:
- Scatter plot
- Line plot
- Pie Chart
- Bar Chart
- Bullet Chart
- Highlight Tables
- Gantt Chart
- Boxplot, etc.
Tableau’s Map features allow you to visualize your data on a geographical map. It is very useful if your data needs to be categorized region-wise or across various countries to help you analyze the performance of each region.
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3) Allows Data Filtering
With the help of Tableau, you can filter data from a single source or multiple sources. But the only condition that needs to be satisfied for filtering data from multiple Data Sources is that the data must have the same dimensions.
Once this is satisfied, Tableau automatically updates the required changes to all your worksheets using the same Data Sources and the same filters that you set previously.
4) Dynamic and Real-time Dashboards
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You can build dynamic and interactive Dashboards using Tableau. Building Reports and Dashboards is made very simple by Tableau. You can make them more informative by adding colorful charts and diagrams.
Using these real-time Dashboards, you can monitor everything in absolute depth for your organization. Tableau also houses a feature that allows you to share your Dashboards and Reports with other employees in the organization.
5) Powerful Collaboration
Every person can work a lot more efficiently if they understand their data and make informed decisions which are critical to success in any organization. Tableau was initially built to enable collaboration among employees.
Using Tableau, all the members in a team can share their work, make follow-up queries with fellow peers, and share visualizations with any employee in the organization, allowing them to gain valuable insights easily.
Tableau gives its users the ability to work and understand the data they need from web editing and authoring to Data Source recommendations. You can easily publish your Dashboard to Tableau Server or Tableau Online within seconds and as a result, everyone in your organization can see your insights, ask various questions, and make the right decisions.
What is Databricks?
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Databricks is an Apache Spark-powered unified Cloud-based data platform. It focuses on Big Data collaboration and Analytics. With Collaborative Notebooks, Machine Learning Runtime, and managed ML Flow, Databricks provides a complete Data Science workspace for Data Scientists, Data Engineers, and Business Analysts to collaborate. It features Spark SQL and Dataframes, which are libraries that allow you to interact with structured data.
Databricks allow you to gain insights from your existing data while also assisting you in the development of Artificial Intelligence solutions. It also includes Machine Learning libraries for creating and training Machine Learning Models, such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, and others.
Many enterprise customers are using Databricks to conduct large-scale production operations across a variety of industries and use cases, including Financial Services, Healthcare, Retail, Media & Entertainment, and many more.
Key Features of Databricks
Databricks is an industry-leading solution for Data Scientists and Analysts due to its capacity to handle and transform large amounts of data. Let’s understand the key features of Databricks.
1) Optimized Spark Engine
Databricks provides the most recent versions of Apache Spark and enables you to integrate Open Source libraries effortlessly. With the global scalability and availability of other Cloud service providers, you can instantly set up clusters and build in a fully managed Apache Spark environment. Clusters are set up, configured, and fine-tuned without the requirement for monitoring to assure reliability and performance.
2) Collaborative Notebooks
With the languages and tools of your choice, you can instantly access and analyze the data, discover and share new insights, and collectively build models. You can code in any language you like, including Python, Scala, R, and SQL.
3) Delta Lake
With an open-source transactional storage layer intended for the whole data lifecycle, you can introduce data reliability and scalability to your existing Data Lake.
4) Machine Learning Capabilities
Databricks provides you with one-click access to preconfigured machine learning environments using cutting-edge frameworks like PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Scikit-learn. From a central repository, you can track and share experiments, reproduce runs, and manage models collaboratively.
To learn more about Databricks, visit the website here.
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Prerequisites for Setting up Databricks Tableau Connection
Before beginning to set up Databricks Tableau Connection, the following information should be gathered:
- Name of the server hosting the database to which you want to connect to.
- HTTP path to the data source
- Method of authentication:
- Azure Active Directory via OAuth
- Personal Access Token
- Username / Password
- Sign-in credentials for the authentication method you’ve chosen:
- Azure AD endpoint
- Personal Access Token password
- Username and password
- Find your cluster server hostname and HTTP path in Databricks by following the instructions in Construct the JDBC URL on the Databricks website.
- (Optional) Initial SQL query that will be executed every time Tableau connects.
What are the Steps to Set up Databricks Tableau Integration?
You can set up Databricks Tableau Connection from Tableau Desktop or Tableau Online. You have to decide how to authenticate from Tableau to Databricks. It can be done in 2 ways:
- Using a Personal access token (recommended).
- With a username and password.
The steps followed to set up Databricks Tableau Connection are as follows:
A) Get Databricks Connection Information
- Step 1: Log in to your Databricks account.
- Step 2: Collect the server hostname and HTTP path.
- Step 3: If you decide to authenticate using a personal access token, then get a token.
B) Configure Databricks Connection in Tableau
- Step 1: Launch Tableau.
- Step 2: In the left navigation pane, select “Connect“.
- Step 3: Under the “To a Server” menu click on the “More…” option.
- Step 4: Now, select the “Databricks” option.
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- Step 5: In the Databricks dialogue box, enter the Server Hostname and HTTP Path to the data source, as collected in Databricks Tableau Connection information.
- Step 6: In the Authentication drop-down, select your preferred authentication method: Azure Active Directory via OAuth, Personal Access Token, or Username / Password.
- Step 7: Enter the parameters for the authentication method you opted for:
- For Azure AD, type the URL for the Azure AD Endpoint.
- For the personal access tokens, type the corresponding Password (the token noted in Databricks connection information).
- For usernames and passwords, type those in the fields provided for Databricks Tableau Integration.
- Step 8: (Optional) Select “Initial SQL” to specify a SQL command to run at the beginning of every connection, such as when you open the workbook, refresh an extract, sign in to Tableau Server, or publish to Tableau Server.
- Step 9: Select the “Sign In” button.
Note: Although the dialogue box has OAuth / Azure AD authentication option, Databricks does not support it. You can provide the parameters necessary for the authentication method and sign-in.
For further information on Databricks Tableau Connection, you can visit here.
What can you Achieve by Databricks Tableau Integration?
Here’s a little something for the data analyst on your team. We’ve mentioned a few core insights you could get by replicating data from Databricks to Tableau, does your use case make the list?
- Visualizing and exploring data stored in Databricks: By connecting Tableau to Databricks, users can easily create charts, graphs, and other visualizations of their data, which can help them better understand trends, patterns, and relationships in the data.
- Creating reports and dashboards: Tableau’s dashboarding and reporting capabilities can be used to create interactive and visually appealing reports that can be shared with others. These reports can be based on data stored in Databricks and can be updated in real-time as new data becomes available.
- Collaborating with others: Tableau’s collaboration features make it easy for users to share their reports and dashboards with others, which can be useful for collaboration within an organization.
- Simplifying data access: The integration between Databricks and Tableau can help simplify data access for users, as they can connect to Databricks and access the data they need without having to go through the process of exporting data or manually transferring it to another tool.
Conclusion
In this article, you have learned about Databricks Tableau Connection. This article also provided information on Tableau, Databricks, their key features, and the steps involved in implementing Databricks Tableau Connection.
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