5 Simple Steps to Get Started with MariaDB and Tableau

For organizations in today’s data-driven economy, easy and fast access to data and insight into data are crucial to stay competitive. In order to leverage the insight from data, companies need easy-to-use and scalable data platforms and visual reporting of the data through front-end business intelligence tools.

MariaDB offers a transactional solution with MariaDB TX and a high-performance analytics solution with MariaDB AX. Both MariaDB TX and MariaDB AX provide an ANSI SQL interface for end users and BI tools. Tableau’s advanced data-visualization tool can interface directly with MariaDB TX and MariaDB AX so BI professionals can confidently use the very same tooling and interface with the same semantics and behavior regardless of whether the data resides in a transactional system or data warehouse. Recently, the Tableau integration with MariaDB was certified.

In this blog post, we show how to connect Tableau to MariaDB TX or MariaDB AX and how to create advanced visualizations in Tableau using data in MariaDB.

Step 1: Download the right packages and load your data into MariaDB.

  • Download and install MariaDB TX (or MariaDB AX).
  • Download and install Tableau Desktop.
  • Next populate data in MariaDB. For this exercise’s purpose we have populated MariaDB Server with the TPCH dataset.

Step 2: Connect from the Tableau desktop to MariaDB.

Step 3: Understand the relationship of the database tables through Tableau.

Step 4: Create basic visualizations in Tableau against the data in MariaDB.

Step 5: Create advanced visualizations in Tableau against the data in MariaDB.

As shown, you can leverage your data assets with the combination of powerful analytic capabilities of MariaDB AX and transactional data in MariaDB TX with the advanced data visualization from Tableau software.

Please leave a comment or contact us for any questions.