Tableau is one of Collibra’s longest standing technical partners, working with Collibra for the last six years. The ongoing integration efforts have consistently delivered value to customers and prospects with data governance, catalog and lineage solutions. Next-generation products and integrations have accelerated with both companies, driving deeper value for shared customers and prospects alike by shrinking the gap between question and answer in the catalog space. The approach is to get better quality insights with metadata and lineage while also making those insights simpler to find and faster to access without the need to leave either system of engagement.
Tableau Catalog
In 2019, Tableau launched the Tableau Catalog as part of the Data Management Add-on. Tableau Catalog helps enable all types of users to catalog, govern, and track attributes across the Tableau platform. Tableau Catalog can help an admin understand the spread of data and attributes in the platform through the lineage UI, and provide ways for report consumers to learn about the context of underlying data and attributes while viewing a specific dashboard. Tableau Catalog also has API connectivity hooks for integration with outside vendors.
Collibra is working to bring the knowledge stored in its enterprise data catalog as close to the user as possible while also working to integrate with each data platform’s catalog. To ease initial adoption and to keep informational parity going forward, Collibra has released an API integration that maps attributes within Collibra Data Catalog to Tableau Catalog. Tableau users may now see data quality warnings, tagging, ownership, domain information, etc., when appropriately mapped directly from Collibra to Tableau without traversing to the Collibra system.
Collibra Everywhere Browser Extension
In the same vein of bringing the information from Collibra Data Catalog seamlessly to the user, Collibra released the Collibra Everywhere Browser Extension in May 2022. The extension enables users to highlight text on their web screen and learn about its meaning from information governed by Collibra. Governed information provides the appropriate context for analysts and report consumers to easily understand new acronyms and specialized jargon within Tableau reports. They can trust that the reports are useful and reliable by digging into report ratings and viewing the business and technical lineage of the report. Learning directly about the text within a report or dashboard also helps new employees to onboard seamlessly and efficiently.
Lineage
One of the main benefits of Collibra’s platform is the ability to get business and technical lineage across different data storage and reporting technologies. Quickly understanding both where this data came from and how it has been transformed are core to building trust in reporting, understanding timeframe context, and analyzing the impact of upstream changes. Collibra upgraded its lineage harvester for Tableau to enable faster lineage parsing with better quality. Since Collibra released this functionality in February 2022, many organizations have reaped value, in industries including healthcare, finance, education, and government.
Tableau Prep
Tableau prep is critical for data analysts and data stewards for the last-mile data preparation.
Prep users may combine data from multiple sources, such as .csv files, Snowflake tables, Databricks tables, and more. Once a prep flow is run the output can be written to a database, or published as a .hyper file to Tableau.
When data is combined at this point in the analytics journey, whether in Tableau Prep, Excel or Python, often the original lineage and field descriptions are lost. This can create confusion and distrust of the data when end users don’t know where the information is coming from or they don’t know how it was aggregated.
With Tableau Catalog and Collibra’s native integration, the confusion and distrust may be alleviated. By default, flow outputs from Tableau prep will preserve the column descriptions from the table level all the way to the published data source and workbook.
Looking to the future
Together, Collibra and Tableau have brought many advantages to customers. The partnership is poised to capitalize on some accelerating trends – namely, the need to track ownership of data domains and data products and the need to automate both provisioning and delivery of reporting and analytic data sets. Collective advances in Tableau Prep, Tableau Catalog, and Collibra’s data-shopping experience will have mutual customers falling in love with an integrated reporting and data set delivery fabric. Stay tuned…
Madeline is a PM on the Technology Partners team at Tableau, overseeing product integrations with Tableau. Previously in solution engineering, she has helped hundreds of customers implement Tableau and build a data culture as they go through digital transformation.
Vaughn brings the voice of the buyer to technical partnerships using his data-office experience from The Johns Hopkins Health System, T. Rowe Price, and Armstrong World Industries, along with the voice of sales from his time at Informatica and multiple data protection vendors.
