Connect Tableau to Databricks

This article shows you how to connect Databricks to Tableau Desktop and includes information about other Tableau editions. You can connect through Partner Connect or you can connect manually.

When you use Databricks as a data source with Tableau, you can provide powerful interactive analytics, bringing the contributions of your data scientists and data engineers to your business analysts by scaling to massive datasets.

To learn more on how to use Tableau Desktop to build reports and visualizations, please read Tutorial: Get Started with Tableau Desktop.

Requirements

Connect data managed by Databricks Unity Catalog to Tableau

Connect data managed by the legacy Databricks Hive metastore to Tableau

  • Tableau Desktop 2019.3 or above.

  • Databricks ODBC Driver 2.6.15 or above.

Authentication options

Use one of the following authentication options:

  • (Recommended) Tableau enabled as an OAuth application in your account. Tableau Desktop is enabled by default. To enable Tableau Cloud or Tableau Server, see Configure Databricks sign-on from Tableau Server.

    Only users enrolled in Tableau’s internal identity provider (IdP) can authenticate using single sign-on (SSO). OAuth tokens for Tableau expire after 90 days.

  • A Databricks personal access token.

    Note

    As a security best practice when you authenticate with automated tools, systems, scripts, and apps, Databricks recommends that you use OAuth tokens.

    If you use personal access token authentication, Databricks recommends using personal access tokens belonging to service principals instead of workspace users. To create tokens for service principals, see Manage tokens for a service principal.

  • A Databricks username (typically your email address) and password.

    Username and password authentication may be disabled if your Databricks workspace is enabled for single sign-on (SSO). If so, use a Databricks personal access token instead.

Connect to Tableau Desktop using Partner Connect

You can use Partner Connect to connect a cluster or SQL warehouse with Tableau Desktop in just a few clicks.

  1. Make sure your Databricks account, workspace, and the signed-in user all meet the requirements for Partner Connect.

  2. In the sidebar, click Partner Connect button Partner Connect.

  3. Click the Tableau tile.

  4. In the Connect to partner dialog, for Compute, choose the name of the Databricks compute resource that you want to connect.

  5. Choose Download connection file.

  6. Open the downloaded connection file, which starts Tableau Desktop.

  7. In Tableau Desktop, enter your authentication credentials, and then click Sign In:

    • To use a Databricks personal access token, enter token for Username and your personal access token for Password.

    • To use a Databricks username and password, enter your username for Username and your password for Password.

After you successfully connect with Tableau Desktop, you can stop here. The remaining information in this article covers additional information about Tableau, such as connecting manually with Tableau Desktop, setting up Tableau Server on Linux, how to use Tableau Online, and best practices and troubleshooting with Tableau.

Connect to Tableau Desktop manually

Follow these instructions to connect to a cluster or SQL warehouse with Tableau Desktop.

Note

To connect faster with Tableau Desktop, use Partner Connect.

  1. Start Tableau Desktop.

  2. Click File > New.

  3. On the Data tab, click Connect to Data.

  4. In the list of connectors, click Databricks.

  5. Enter the Server Hostname and HTTP Path.

  6. For Authentication, choose your authentication method, enter your authentication credentials, and then click Sign in.

    • To use a Databricks personal access token, select Personal Access Token and enter your personal access token for Password.

    • To use a Databricks username and password, select Username / Password and enter your username for Username and your password for Password.

    • OAuth/Microsoft Entra ID. For OAuth endpoint, enter https://{<server-hostname>}/oidc, where <server-hostname> is the Server Hostname for your cluster or SQL warehouse. A browser window opens and prompts you to sign in to your IdP.

    If Unity Catalog is enabled for your workspace, additionally set the default catalog. In the Advanced tab, for Connection properties, add Catalog=<catalog-name>. To change the default catalog, in the Initial SQL tab, enter USE CATALOG <catalog-name>.

After you successfully connect with Tableau Desktop, you can stop here. The remaining information in this article covers additional information about Tableau, such as setting up Tableau Server on Linux, how to use Tableau Online, and best practices and troubleshooting with Tableau.

Tableau Server on Linux

Edit /etc/odbcinst.ini to include the following:

[Simba Spark ODBC Driver 64-bit]
Description=Simba Spark ODBC Driver (64-bit)
Driver=/opt/simba/spark/lib/64/libsparkodbc_sb64.so

Note

Tableau Server on Linux recommends 64-bit processing architecture.

Publish and refresh a workbook on Tableau Online

This article shows how to publish a workbook from Tableau Desktop to Tableau Online and keep it updated when the data source changes. You need a workbook in Tableau Desktop and a Tableau Online account.

  1. Extract the workbook’s data from Tableau Desktop: in Tableau Desktop, with the workbook that you want to publish displayed, click Data > <data-source-name> > Extract Data.

  2. In the Extract Data dialog box, click Extract.

  3. Browse to a location on your local machine where you want to save the extracted data, and then click Save.

  4. Publish the workbook’s data source to Tableau Online: in Tableau Desktop, click Server > Publish Data Source > <data-source-name>.

  5. If the Tableau Server Sign In dialog box displays, click the Tableau Online link, and follow the on-screen directions to sign in to Tableau Online.

  6. In the Publish Data Source to Tableau Online dialog box, next to Refresh Not Enabled, click the Edit link.

  7. In the flyout box that displays, for Authentication, change Refresh not enabled to Allow refresh access.

  8. Click anywhere outside of this flyout to hide it.

  9. Select Update workbook to use the published data source.

  10. Click Publish. The data source displays in Tableau Online.

  11. In Tableau Online, in the Publishing Complete dialog box, click Schedule, and follow the on-screen directions.

  12. Publish the workbook to Tableau Online: in Tableau Desktop, with the workbook you want to publish displayed, click Server > Publish Workbook.

  13. In the Publish Workbook to Tableau Online dialog box, click Publish. The workbook displays in Tableau Online.

Tableau Online checks for changes to the data source according to the schedule you set, and updates the published workbook if changes are detected.

For more information, see the following on the Tableau website:

Best practices and troubleshooting

The two fundamental actions to optimize Tableau queries are:

  • Reduce the number of records being queried and visualized in a single chart or dashboard.

  • Reduce the number of queries being sent by Tableau in a single chart or dashboard.

Deciding which to try first depends on your dashboard. If you have a number of different charts for individual users all in the same dashboard, it’s likely that Tableau is sending too many queries to Databricks. If you only have a couple of charts but they take a long time to load, there are probably too many records being returned by Databricks to load effectively.

Tableau performance recording, available on both Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server, can help you understand where performance bottlenecks are by identifying processes that are causing latency when you run a particular workflow or dashboard.

Enable performance recording to debug any Tableau issue

For instance, if query execution is the problem, you know it has to do with the data engine process or the data source that you are querying. If the visual layout is performing slowly, you know that it is the VizQL.

If the performance recording says that the latency is in executing query, it is likely that too much time is taken by Databricks returning the results or by the ODBC/Connector overlay processing the data into SQL for VizQL. When this occurs, you should analyze what you are returning and attempt to change the analytical pattern to have a dashboard per group, segment, or article instead of trying to cram everything into one dashboard and relying on Quick Filters.

If the poor performance is caused by sorting or visual layout, the problem may be the number of marks the dashboard is trying to return. Databricks can return one million records quickly, but Tableau may not be able to compute the layout and sort the results. If this is a problem, aggregate the query and drill into the lower levels. You can also try a bigger machine, since Tableau is only constrained by physical resources on the machine on which it is running.

For an in-depth tutorial on the performance recorder, see Create a Performance Recording.

Performance on Tableau Server versus Tableau Desktop

In general, a workflow that runs on Tableau Desktop is not any faster on Tableau Server. A dashboard that doesn’t execute on Tableau Desktop won’t execute on Tableau Server. This is important to keep in mind.

In fact, getting things working on Desktop is a much better troubleshooting technique, because Tableau Server has more processes to consider when you troubleshoot. And if things work in Tableau Desktop but not in Tableau Server, then you can safely narrow the issue down to the processes in Tableau Server that aren’t in Tableau Desktop.

Configuration

By default, the parameters from the connection URL override those in the Simba ODBC DSN. There are two ways you can customize the ODBC configurations from Tableau:

  • .tds file for a single data source:

    1. Follow the instructions in Save Data Sources to export the .tds file for the data source.

    2. Find the property line odbc-connect-string-extras='' in the .tds file and set the parameters. For example, to enable AutoReconnect and UseNativeQuery, you can change the line to odbc-connect-string-extras='AutoReconnect=1,UseNativeQuery=1'.

    3. Reload the .tds file by reconnecting the connection.

    The compute resource is optimized to use less heap memory for collecting large results, so it can serve more rows per fetch block than Simba ODBC’s default. Append RowsFetchedPerBlock=100000' to the value of the odbc-connect-string-extras property.

  • .tdc file for all data sources:

    1. If you have never created a .tdc file, you can add TableauTdcExample.tdc to the folder Document/My Tableau Repository/Datasources.

    2. Add the file to all developers’ Tableau Desktop installations, so that it works when the dashboards are shared.

Optimize charts (worksheets)

There are a number of tactical chart optimizations that can help you improve the performance of your Tableau worksheets.

For filters that don’t change often and are not meant to be interacted with, use context filters, which speed up execution time. Another good rule of thumb is to use if/else statements instead of case/when statements in your queries.

Tableau can push down filters into data sources, which can greatly speed up query speeds. See Filtering Across Multiple Data Sources Using a Parameter and Filter Data Across Multiple Data Sources for more information about data source push down filters.

It is best to avoid table calculations if you can because they need to scan the full dataset. For more information about table calculations, see Transform Values with Table Calculations.

Optimize dashboards

Here are a number of tips and troubleshooting exercises you can apply to improve the performance of your Tableau dashboard.

A common source of issues with Tableau dashboards connected to Databricks is the use of quick filters on individual dashboards that serve a number of different users, functions, or segments. You can attach global quick filters to all of the charts on the dashboard. It’s a great feature, but one that can quickly cause problems. One global quick filter on a dashboard with five charts causes a minimum of 10 queries to be sent to Databricks. This can spiral to greater numbers as more filters are added and can cause massive performance problems, because Spark is not built to handle many concurrent queries starting at the same exact moment. This becomes more problematic when the Databricks cluster or SQL warehouse that you are using is not large enough to handle the high volume of queries.

As a first step, we recommend that you use Tableau performance recording to troubleshoot what might be causing the issue.

If the poor performance is caused by sorting or visual layout, the problem may be the number of marks the dashboard is trying to return. Databricks can return one million records quickly, but Tableau may not be able to compute the layout and sort the results. If this is a problem, aggregate the query and drill into the lower levels. You can also try a bigger machine, since Tableau is only constrained by physical resources on the machine on which it is running.

For information about drilling down in Tableau, see Drill down into the details.

In general, seeing many granular marks is often a poor analytical pattern, because it doesn’t provide insight. Drilling down from higher levels of aggregation makes more sense and reduces the number of records that need to be processed and visualized.

Use actions to optimize dashboards

To drill from group to segment to article in order to obtain the same analysis and information as the “ocean boiled” dashboard, you can use Tableau actions. Actions allow you to click a mark (for example a state on a map) and be sent to another dashboard that filters based on the state you click. This reduces the need to have many filters on one dashboard and reduces the number of records that need to be generated, because you can set an action to not generate records until it gets a predicate to filter on.

For more information, see Actions and 6 Tips to Make Your Dashboards More Performant.

Caching

Caching data is a good way to improve the performance of worksheets or dashboards.

Caching in Tableau

Tableau has four layers of caching before it goes back to the data, whether that data is in a live connection or an extract:

  • Tiles: If someone is loading the exact same dashboard and nothing changes, then Tableau tries to reuse the same tiles for the charts. This is similar to Google Maps tiles.

  • Model: There are mathematical calculations used to generate visualizations in the event that tiles can’t be used. Tableau Server attempts to use the same models.

  • Abstract: Aggregate results of queries are stored as well. This is the third “defense” level. If a query returns Sum(Sales), Count(orders), Sum(Cost), in a previous query and a future query wants just Sum(Sales), then Tableau grabs that result and uses it.

  • Native Cache: If the query is the exact same as another one, Tableau uses the same results. This is the last level of caching. If this fails, then Tableau goes to the data.

Caching frequency in Tableau

Tableau has administrative settings for caching more or less often. If the server is set to Refresh Less Often, Tableau keeps data in the cache for up to 12 hours. If it is set to Refresh More Often, Tableau goes back to the data on every page refresh.

Customers who have the same dashboard being used over again—for example, “Monday morning pipeline reports”—should be on a server set to Refresh Less Often so that the dashboards all use the same cache.

Cache warming in Tableau

In Tableau you can warm the cache by setting a subscription for the dashboard to be sent before you want the dashboard viewed. This is because the dashboard needs to be rendered in order to generate the image for the subscription email. See Warming the Tableau Server Cache Using Subscriptions.

Caching in Databricks

You can cache popular tables or critical tables before users consume Tableau dashboards to reduce the time it takes for Databricks to return the results to Tableau.

You can run scripts in the morning to SELECT CACHE for specific tables with Delta caching on virtual machines that are optimized for caching.

You can even cache specific queries that Databricks gets from the driver.

Tableau Desktop: The error The drivers... are not properly installed displays

Issue: When you try to connect Tableau Desktop to Databricks, Tableau displays an error message in the connection dialog with a link to the driver download page, where you can find driver links and installation instructions.

Cause: Your installation of Tableau Desktop is not running a supported driver.

Resolution: Download the Databricks ODBC driver version 2.6.15 or above.

See also: Error “The drivers… are not properly installed” on the Tableau website.