Having now finally had a look at Tableau I'm surprised (more like stunned) that it is rated so highly. Or even highly at all.
Compared to Qlik Sense and to a lesser extend Power BI (potentially very good but not close to Qlik yet) it's how shall I say this --- a bit limited.
Please correct me if I wrong here. But
"Blending data from different sources can be difficult as no ETL to normalize data".
I read this elsewhere. This is just unacceptable in this day and age. It's a joke how Tableau blending works. Power BI is good in this respect. As is Qlik.
But two other issues I have with Tableau data loading is this. These are both show stoppers for me.
Outer joins. I couldn't do one. Only left and inner. Even though the outer and right options appeared on the load screen. Power BI and Qlik can do all four.
Many to many. Power BI can not do this. Fair enough but thankfully Qlik can. The DEFAULT with Qlik though is join keep. Tableau can do many to many but the default seems to be join. So all of the figures in a fact table double etc. This is another show stopper surely.
I'm still trying to find out how to concatenate (or append / horizontally join) two tables.
Am I wrong on this. It seems to me that another tool is needed to prepare the data for loading into Tableau as Tableau is just too limited for serious data joining, cleansing and massaging before loading data when required.
And the rest does not look too much better. But I'm still evaluating Tableau with this feeling that something is not right here. How is this product rated so highly?
On the other hand it was a joy evaluating Power BI. Its still a way behind Qlik Sense but looks potentially very good. I'm sure it will be improved quickly though. But at this point it still needs to be.
