This overview of the Tableau data handling engine demonstrates a flexible approach to interfacing with data. Knowledge of the data handling engine is helpful if you want to understand the parameters for Tableau data readiness. Two major takeaways from this section are as follows:
- It is not necessary to explicitly define data types and roles for optimal Tableau usage.
- Comparison calculations such as moving averages and running totals can be addressed by table calculations in Tableau and thus do not need to be calculated in advance.
The knowledge of these two takeaways can reduce data preparation and data modeling efforts, and thus helps us streamline the overall data mining life cycle.