Filter is an effective way to control the amount of data needed for analysis. We have mentioned in our blog Top Reasons to Choose TABLEAU as a Reporting Platform and Issues associated with it, that we had faced another issue which was with the date filter update in Tableau dashboard. This is a familiar topic in Tableau community.

The normal flow of working should be that filters should have been updated automatically keeping in track of the most recently retrieved data. In this case, the dashboard was not getting updated with the latest data. We worked around this problem and came up with below mentioned solution to automate and fix this issue in its entirety.

Filters/parameters were not updated on regular basis according to latest data. We created a Power shell script which updated the filters/parameters to reflect the new data that was loaded into the Dashboard.

  • PowerShell script downloads the dashboard from the server, unpacks it. Edits the xml file (.twb) to search and replace the date value with the latest date captured from Database.
  • Selection criteria parameters like date amounts get refreshed to reflect the latest data loaded in Tableau. Will give real time data on the reports.

Handling database locking issues is quite complicated. Lets talk about how we handled database locking issue.

Alert Mails for Database locking issue

If a business user is facing issue with slowness in dashboard generation on Tableau platform, the technical team will receive an email where the problem program lies. It will include the exact program which is part of number of programs which is running simultaneously to run one dashboard.

System has been configured to send out a mail to the entire Technical Development/Technical Support team regarding long running queries. This mail will contain details like the host name, Program and the actual query.

These alerts streamline the process of managing long running queries that may be blocking resources. DBAs can kill sessions with long running queries to free system resources.

This completes this series of blog on Tableau reporting platform. Hang on we are not yet finished, next we share our experiences with challenges with Data Integration. Stay glued for some really cool solutions coming your way.