Tableau released its latest version Tableau 2020.3 in August 2020 which brings many powerful new functionalities to help users scale up analytics and provide easy access to data. Many improvements to background maps, ask data, explain data, and other areas have been provided by Tableau. This blog summarizes the highlights which are listed below:
- Write to external databases in Tableau Prep
- Grant license on Sign In
- SAP Integration Improvements
Write to external databases in Tableau Prep
Tableau has released the feature of writing the prepared data directly into a relational database, which was a highly requested feature by users. With the latest release, writing to 7 relational databases is possible and there is a roadmap to add more databases in the future. The 7 databases include SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Teradata, Snowflake and Amazon Redshift. Writing the data to tables in the database will help improve monitoring, auditing, governance and access controls available in users’ organizations. With this new feature made available in Tableau, data can be loaded incrementally to database tables. This reduces the movement of data and increases the efficiency of the flows in Tableau Prep.

Writing to a database table from Tableau Prep is a pretty straightforward process. Users can select ‘Database table’ option under ‘Save Output to’. Based on the database chosen, the details required to establish the connection are to be provided. Tableau creates a table or appends the data to the existing table based on the option chosen when the flow is run. The flow can also be scheduled so that the data gets updated.
Grant license on the Sign In
The Grant License feature allows site admins to assign members to be automatically granted a site role when they login to their Tableau Online or Tableau Server accounts for the first time. Based on the user designated by the admin, the roles such as viewer, explorer, and the creator will be assigned. This eliminates the need to manually respond to license requests which makes granting licenses easier. The license can be a grant for individuals, teams, departments, or the entire organization based on the requirement posed. This helps to avoid granting of licenses to inactive users since the licenses assigned by this feature are only during their first Sign In.
SAP Integration Improvements
These improvements include a new feature that allows the users to connect to table functions for SAP HANA Connectors. Tableau has received official SAP Certification and they have released whitepapers on the best practices and updates on how to work efficiently with SAP products and Tableau. Improved integration can be achieved using this latest feature. Proposals on the considerations and usage of the right solution for S/4HANA and BW/4HANA are explained in detail in the whitepaper by Tableau which can be viewed here. Tableau can provide insights for your business when the transactional data is moved into an environment designed for the desired level of processing. Now users who have data to analyze in SAP HANA can make better use of
Besides these highlights, there are many other interesting features released in Tableau 2020.3. To know more about these features, check out the release notes from Tableau here. A few other interesting features will be explained in the upcoming blogs.
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