Tableau’s latest release adds governance, security and scalability features

Tableau has announced the release of its latest version, 2021.3, which adds new features that Tableau product marketing VP Loreal Lynch describes as having been reimagined for the modern enterprise, “including new enterprise subscription plans and new enterprise capabilities from governance and security to platform scalability.”

Citing data from McKinsey, Tableau said that 92% of companies are failing to scale their analytics projects. Mulesoft and Coleman Parkes Research found that 87% of IT and business leaders worry that security and governance slow innovation, Tableau noted. The new features in Tableau 2021.3 are in many ways designed to address that.

SEE: Electronic Data Disposal Policy (TechRepublic Premium)

The first set of new features falls into the data management and governance category and should make life easier for those dealing with both administration and preparation of data. Tableau Catalog, which discovers and indexes content and data, now allows users to see inherited descriptions inside of web authoring flows, and data quality warnings that link to impacted dashboards are now available as subscription-based email notifications. 

Megan Oertel, director of product analytics at Sysco LABS, said that her team has been very focused on cataloging definitions and logic at the raw data level, and describes the new Tableau Catalog features as a visual interpretation of her work. “Being able to describe columns in Tableau and incorporating data warnings at the visualization level of our platform will be a nice boost in our efforts to ensure that our users trust and understand the data we are surfacing for them,” Oertel said. 

New security features being added in 2021.3 will “increase flexibility and segmentation by allowing Tableau administrators to centrally configure which users and groups have access to which slices of data,” Lynch said. Centralized row-level security gives administrators the ability to define and manage security down to the individual row of a table, and will share those roles across Tableau flows, data sources, and workbooks that depend on the originally restricted data. Virtual connections that will let Tableau users create and share data to different tables through a governed database connection are also being added.

Scaling, as mentioned above, is a central element of the changes Salesforce is introducing in Tableau 2021.3, and three new scaling features are being added to Tableau 2021.3 in the coming months. 

Technology-agnostic and platform independent enterprise reference architecture, scheduled for release later this year will help Tableau users build their systems with an eye toward availability, scalability and security. Resource management features are becoming more robust in the coming months as well, with the ability to improve job queue performance by limiting background resource usage coming early next year. 

In addition, new as-yet unnamed resource management capabilities for Tableau Server Management will be coming next year as well. Dynamic scaling within a containerized version of Tableau Server is also scheduled to be released in the same timeframe. 

SEE: Snowflake data warehouse platform: A cheat sheet (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Lastly, Lynch said that Tableau plans to simplify its enterprise subscription plans by bundling several different services. Creator, Explorer and Viewer licenses for Tableau Online with Data Management are being bundled, as are Data Management plus Server Management for Tableau Server. 

Tableau 2021.3 is scheduled for release later in September, and will launch with the new subscription plans, data prep features, and catalog improvements.

Data, Analytics and AI Newsletter

Learn the latest news and best practices about data science, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence.
Delivered Mondays

Sign up today

Also see