Tableau

Tableau is a data visualisation and business intelligence software. Using the MonetDB ODBC driver, one can easily access one's data.

Note: currently, only the Windows version of Tableau Desktop support ODBC connections. Tableau Public and all OS X versions do not support ODBC connection.

To configure a connection to a MonetDB database, download MonetDB ODBC driver and install Tableau.

One should download the appropriate version (32 or 64-bit) based on one's system. For instance, 64-bit Tableau only works with a 64-bit ODBC driver on a 64-bit Windows.

After having started a database instance and loaded the data, one can open Tableau to configure the connection. From the welcome screen, first, select "Connect to data"; then scroll to the bottom of the "On a server" list and select "Other Databases (ODBC)". After that, fill in the required details for a connection to the MonetDB server:

  1. Select "DSN" and find MonetDB from the drop-down menu

  2. Click connect to initialise the driver. If no system-wide "DSN" has been configured, one can now enter the details for a database connection.

  3. Type in the hostname of the server - localhost by default.

  4. Type in the port of the database server - 50000 by default.

  5. Enter the database name - demo is the default database on Windows MonetDB installations.

  6. Type in the username and password for the database.

Click OK, and Tableau will establish a connection with the database instance.

Next, to get ready for data exploration or reporting, one must select which tables should be loaded in a Tableau worksheet.

  1. Open the "Schema" drop-down menu, click on the search button to list all schemas and select that one with your data tables - sys by default.

  2. Open the "Table" drop-down menu and click on the search button to list all schemas. Selecting more than one table will usually bring up a menu to join the rows in a single query. Alternatively, you can write your own "Custom SQL query".

  3. Select the table(s) you want to add for visualisation. Depending on the data size, you might want to enable "Automatically Update" the table contents.

  4. Click on the "Go to Worksheet" button.

That's it; you can now explore and visualise the data with Tableau.

You can also use Tableau instructions for MonetDB ODBC connection setup on Tableau connector.

You can find more about Tableau and ODBC connections on their website.