Tableau Software Announces General Availability Of Tableau 5.0

Tableau Software , a provider of business intelligence software, has announced the general availability of Tableau 5.0, the next generation of the Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server product suite. With more than 60 new features, Tableau 5.0 helps businesses of all sizes see and understand their data better than ever. New dashboard and interactive visualisation capabilities, along with improved scalability and performance make Tableau 5.0 ideal for large business intelligence deployments. Tableau 5.0 is available for free download at http://www.tableausoftware.com/trial .

Active Dashboards

Tableau 5.0 now offers capabilities to create active dashboards and interactive visualisations that enable people anywhere in an organisation to track and explore their most important metrics. With just a few clicks, Tableau business dashboards give users the ability to highlight and filter related data – known as brushing and linking. Users can share and follow emerging stories in their data using guided analytics that include links to other dashboards, reports and applications.

With the enhancements found in Tableau 5.0 people can now:

- Build dashboards that access multiple sources of data as well as highlight and filter across those diverse data sources.
- Use an interactive data visualisation in a dashboard to filter all other data visualisations within a dashboard.
- Filter time-series data using automatically calculated relative time periods (e.g., last quarter, this week, etc)
- Aggregate and minimise data on-the-fly without losing analytical resolution through smart extracts
- Launch other software applications with one click or even a mouse-hover
- Add advanced mapping geographies to customise geographic analysis
- Copy and paste data directly into Tableau from a browser or other applications

Improved Scalability and Enterprise Performance

With upgrades to scalability, performance and ease of maintenance, Tableau Server 5.0 can scale to meet the demands of nearly any environment. Load can be distributed to multiple servers to support numerous users; companies can easily add more hardware to their Tableau Server environment as needed. Along with enhanced multithreading, distributing server load means simultaneous users have no delays in working with their view. And new management and monitoring tools make it easier for IT staff to track and support their Tableau Server.

Other enterprise enhancements include:

- Scheduled updates of the data used in Tableau results. By pre-collecting the data used in any Tableau view, the server provides a high-performance experience while offloading the query load from the source database
- Secure access to the server is provided by support for SSL, particularly useful for extranet deployments
- Improved database performance when working with large databases. This includes special optimisations, such as join logic, for Teradata and Oracle connections
- Access to data anywhere – people can work offline with exactly the data they need in extracts. Extracts can be automatically refreshed and synchronised
- Automated server administration activities, such as user management, with the server command line utility

More than 60 New Features

Tableau 5.0 has over 60 new features. Additional capabilities include wildcard quick filters, dual axis visualisations, search within quick filters, data portability and customised data details. For a full list of new features and upgrades, click here .