Tableau Drivers

Let us discuss the most important point, most of the Big Data vendors want to showcase that Tableau can connect to each of their unique database engines which is possible by a simple answer. This can be achieved by building an ODBC driver, which is not a simple process nonetheless. ODBC driver technology has been in this industry for considerably over 20 years and will remain tall, hence the confidence that most of these vendors show in building their own ODBC drivers. Let us now take a look at how these are done, what are the possible options for us to connect with Tableau Desktop software.

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Tableau Essbase Driver

Q1) What are Tableau Drivers?

Ans: Tableau Desktop version comes with in-built support to connect to various kinds of data sources ranging from excel files to text files, comma separated files, Access and etc. If you are willing to connect to a data source that does not fall in this range, then you have Tableau Server to come to your rescue. Tableau Server is a very powerful tool than Tableau Desktop which comes with data source options more than 40 in number. Tableau Drivers are a part of the Tableau Server installation, where the installers for Tableau Server or Tableau Server Workers automatically installs the required drivers for Oracle and Oracle Essbase databases.

Tableau Desktop already comes in seamless integration with many data providers and Tableau itself provides a list of all the supported drivers that one can use to connect with Tableau from the corresponding data source. The list of data sources and the supported drivers are available for download from the Tableau site. Though support to each of these drivers and the corresponding data sources depends very much on the version of the Tableau product. The product version can be seen on Tableau Desktop (Help -> About Tableau) and on Tableau Server, click on the information icon and then select About Tableau Server.

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With that said, what if you are making an attempt to connect to a data source that do not support any ODBC connector readily – there is nothing that you might have to worry about. Tableau provides an ODBC connector that uses and follows all of the ODBC standards. Using ODBC, you can connect with any data source that follows the SQL standards and implements their own ODBC API.

Q2) How do Tableau products determine the capabilities of an ODBC driver?

Ans: As there are many different varieties of data sources, it is very obvious that each of these data sources would implement their own drivers in a uniquely different way. Tableau uses the feature-discovery API in the ODBC APIs to question around the database or the data source driver about the functionalities each of this support. By this, it should be understood very well that fewer the limitations on the ODBC driver then more the functions and functionalities that it supports along with Tableau and data sources. Coming to this point, it is very important that you note that the ODBC connectivity is limited only to the Windows environments.

During the initial connection Tableau will request the driver and SQL discovery to provide details in order to determine the number of functionalities or capabilities that it will be able to support. Let us now take a look at some of the capabilities discovery that Tableau performs include: