Synchronizing Tableau is the process of ingesting metadata from a selected Tableau Server or Tableau Online and making the data available in Collibra Platform.
Synchronization includes the following actions:
- For each Tableau site, a subcommunity is created in the community that was created during the registration of Tableau Server or Tableau Online.
- For each Tableau project, a Tableau Catalog domain is created in the community.
- In each Catalog BI domain, a Tableau Site asset is created, with the same name as the site.
- In each Catalog BI domain, the relevant assets are created, depending on the Tableau user's permissions.
- Relations that were created between Tableau assets and other assets via a relation type in the Tableau operating model, are deleted after synchronization.
- Currently, we only support published Tableau data sources with an extract or a live connection. For more information, see the Tableau documentation.
The following image shows an example structure after synchronizing Tableau.
Starting synchronization
You can synchronize manually, or you can automate the process by adding a synchronization schedule via a cron expression.
You can only synchronize one Tableau Server asset at a time. If a synchronization job is in progress and a second one is triggered (manually or automatically), it will be queued.
If a synchronization job is running and a new synchronization of the same Tableau Server asset is triggered (manually or automatically), the running synchronization continues and the new synchronization request is ignored.
Note If you have stitched Tableau's logical data layer to Data Catalog physical data layer, you have to restitch to make sure that all relations are up-to-date.
Synchronization errors
In the following situations, nothing is synchronized and no subcommunities, domains or assets are created:
- If the job fails to start due to connection problems.
- If the job fails in the middle of the procedure.
- If the job is canceled.
For more information about Tableau synchronization issues, see the troubleshooting section.
Warning If you upgrade to Tableau version 2020.2 or newer, but previously synchronized an older Tableau version via the REST API and XML mapping, you have to prepare the migration procedure to prevent losing manually added relations, attributes, tags, comments and stitching results.
Limitations and considerations
Collibra does not support the following Tableau features:- Gzipped encoding in REST results from Tableau.
- Tableau data sources that are created using Custom SQL.
- Tableau data sources that are created using Multiple tables union.
Collibra does support Tableau data sources that are created using:
- Cross-database joins
- Multiple tables join
- Relationships
- Single table
For more information, see the Tableau documentation.
Naming convention
When you synchronize Tableau, Collibra follows a strict naming convention for the names of the new assets. Each asset has a display name and full name. The full name represents the asset path from asset to the database in which it is located. You can freely edit the display name. However, you should never edit the full name, because Data Catalog may need it to synchronize and stitch data sources. This can cause unexpected results and break the synchronization process.
Warning Editing full name of the Tableau Server or Tableau Online assets may lead to errors during the synchronization process.