Publishing extract datasource

tableaucommunity@tableau.com — Fri, 20 May 2011 14:53:52 GMT

Hello,

I'm really fresh on Tableau. And am wondering about publishing extract data sources.

Since using Tableau data extract is the recommended way of accessing data for performance, we do naturally want to use that for our reports. Our aim is to refresh extracts from an SQL server on hourly,daily or weekly basis... Then have whatever workbooks that are created import to those extracts.

Workbooks would be created and viewed by many different users but share the same extract data sources.

The problem is that the published extract data sources all reference the extract files on the local computer where the workbooks were created. So when someone else is trying to use your published extract data source on the server it fails with a file not found error.

After reading around on the forums a bit more I'm starting to suspect that Tableau wasn't designed to do it that way. But I have a hard time wrapping my head around it. What would the purpose be to publish an extract to the server if only person can use it?

Now I'm trying to figure out a way around that problem. My first thought was to use a shared drive on the Tableau server to put the extracts on. But it seems like the desktop client doesn't deal with UNC paths. This would mean that everyone accessing the extracts would have to use the same drive letter. Doable, but it feels clumsy.

How us everybody else going about this?

Every 5 cents welcome!

/Bjorn

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Publishing extract datasource