Blends
Relationships make data blending a little less needed and it can be seen as legacy functionality. But for the sake of completeness and for older Tableau versions (below 2020.2), let’s consider a summary of data blending in the following sections. In a nutshell, data blending allows you to merge multiple disparate data sources into a single view. Understanding the following four points will give you a grasp of the main points regarding data blending:
- Data blending is typically used to merge data from multiple data sources. Although as of Tableau 10, joins are possible between multiple data sources, there are still cases when data blending is the only feasible option to merge data from two or more sources. In the following sections, we will see a practical example that demonstrates such a case.
- Data blending requires a shared dimension. A date dimension is often a viable candidate for blending multiple data sources.
- Data blending aggregates and then...
