On Improving User Response Times in Tableau
2015 ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference, Melbourne, VIC, Australia May 31 - June 4, 2015
The rapid increase in data volumes and complexity of applied analytical tasks poses a big challenge for visualization solutions. It is important to keep the experience highly interactive, so that users stay engaged and can perform insightful data exploration.
Query processing usually dominates the cost of visualization generation. Therefore, in order to achieve acceptable response times, one needs to utilize backend capabilities to the fullest and apply techniques, such as caching or prefetching. In this paper we discuss key data processing components in Tableau: the query processor, query caches, Tableau Data Engine and Data Server. Furthermore, we cover recent performance improvements related to the number and quality of remote queries, broader reuse of cached data, and application of inter and intra query parallelism.
Author(s)
Valeri Kim