Tableau Your Data!, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11 Installing Tableau Server

The more you have in your cup, the more likely people are to want a drink.

Seth Godin¹

In the first ten chapters, you learned how to use Tableau to connect to data, analyze data, visualize data, build dashboards, and share stories. This chapter and the next two are about installing, managing, and automating Tableau’s Server. Tableau provides three different tools for sharing information—Tableau Public, Tableau Online, and Tableau Server.

Tableau Public is a free cloud-hosted service aimed at bloggers, students, or data visualization enthusiasts who want to share their work publicly. It is not designed for enterprise environments that require data security. In fact, anything published on Tableau Public is freely available for anyone to download. This tool is generally not used in enterprise environments that need to control access to the information.

Tableau Online is another cloud-based information sharing environment (managed by Tableau Software) that provides data security without the need for installing any software or managing hardware. Your data is stored in a secure environment managed by Tableau Software. To start using Tableau Online, just sign up for the service and assign access to your users based on your security needs.

Tableau Server is for customers who need to control where and how the data is stored and managed. It can be installed on hardware behind your firewall or on cloud services that you contract with directly. You ...