Tableau On-Premises Connector

Connectivity Summary

Technical Specifications

The connector capabilities are shown below:

Crawling

Profiling

There is no profiling as we are not supporting profiling for report frameworks.

Lineage Building

Pre-requisites

To use the connector, the following need to be available:

• Connection details as specified in the following section should be available.
• An admin / service account with read privileges.

Lineage Information

By using workbook source code information, finding the datasources of a report and connecting those data sources to the workbook and their original source tables.

Connection Details

The following connection settings should be added for connecting to a Tableau database

Once connectivity is established, additional configurations for crawling and profiling can be specified:

Points to note:

1. If the report has the embed datasource which is not published separately, consider it as the internal datasource of the report. 
2. Viewer Permission is needed to crawl the reports and data sources.

 OvalEdge Crawling is a process of collecting information about data from various data sources like on-premise, cloud databases, Hadoop, visualization software, and file systems. When an OvalEdge crawler connects to a data source, it collects and catalogs all the data elements (i.e. metadata) and stores it in the OvalEdge data repository. Here the crawler creates an index for every stored data element, which can later be used in data exploration within the OvalEdge Data catalog which is a smart search. The OvalEdge crawlers can be scheduled to scan the databases regularly, so they always have an up-to-date index of the data element.

Data Sources: The Data Sources are the ones where the OvalEdge crawler integrates with various data sources to help the users to extract metadata and build a data catalog. This document provides information about how to make a connection to your Tableau instance and crawl the reports and tiles built from various workspaces.

Connect to the Data: Before crawling and building a, you must first connect to your data. OvalEdge requires users to configure a separate connection for each type of data source. The users must enter the source credentials and database information for each type of connectivity. Once a data connection is made, a simple click of the Crawl button starts the crawling process.

2. Configure a new database connection

To connect to the Tableau database using the OvalEdge application, complete the following steps.

1. Login to the OvalEdge application
2. In the left menu, click on the Administration module name, the sub-modules associated with the Administration are displayed.
3. Click on the Crawler sub-module name, the Crawler Information page is displayed.
4. In the Crawler Information page, click on the . The Manage Connection with Search Connector pop-up window is displayed.
5. In the Manage Connection pop-up window, select the connection type as Tableau. The Manage Connection with Tableau-specific details pop-up window is displayed.
   

6. The following are the field attributes required for the connection of Tableau.

   Configuration	Default/Sample value*	Description
   Database Type	Tableau	Select the database type from the list
   License Type		Auto lineage
   Connection Name	Requires input	Reference name for identification while crawling
   Tableau Host URL	Requires input	Tableau server instance(on-premises/cloud-based)
   Tableau Content URL	Not Required for Tableau Server. Users can repeat the Host URL here.	Reference document: https://help.tableau.com/current/api/rest_api/en-us/REST/rest_api_concepts_auth.htm
   Trusted to Host(Y/N)	Requires input	Y to enable host IP as the trusted connection. N to disable host IP as the trusted connection.
   Username	Requires input	Username for Tableau Server account
   Password	Requires input	Password for Tableau Server account
   Tableau API Version	2.8 3.0 3.0	Default value REST API for Tableau server 10.5 REST API for Tableau server 2018.1.6
   OvalEdge Server	Not Required for Tableau Server	Keep it blank

7. Once after entering the connection details in the required fields, click on the button the entered connection details are validated the Save and Save & Configure buttons are enabled.
8. Click on the button to establish the connection or the user can also directly click on the button to establish the connection and configure the connection settings. Here when you click on the Save & Configure button, the Connection Settings pop-up window is displayed, where you can configure the connection settings for the selected Connector.

Note 1: The Save & Configure button is displayed only for the Connectors for which the settings configuration is required.

Note 2: The difference between Tableau On-Premises and Online server Connection:

• Tableau On-Premises  - For this type of connection we need to provide Token based Authentication as ‘’’N’’
• Tableau Online  - For this type of connection we need to provide Token based Authentication as ’’Y’

2.1. Permissions

Tableau Server users who are site administrators can download data source revisions on the site that they are administrators for. Users who are not server administrators or site administrators can get data source revisions if they have all of the following:

• A site role of ExplorerCanPublish.
• Read (view), Write (save), and Download (save as) permissions for the specified data source.
• Save (write) permissions for the project that contains the data source.

3. Crawl a database connection

In OvalEdge, each data source can be crawled at a Schema level. In other words, when there are multiple schemas within a database, you have an option to select a specific schema and crawl. Here Tableau reports can be crawled at the workspace level.

To crawl a specific Schema or multiple schemas:

1. Login to the OvalEdge application.
2. Navigate to the Administration module and select the Crawler submodule. The Crawler Information page is displayed.
   
   
3. In the Crawler Information page, select a connection that was created (Tableau) and click on the  Crawl/Profile button. The pop-up window for selecting the Schema is displayed.
   
4. Select the checkbox next to the Schema Name and select the Crawl option. If you want to select all the Schemas, click on the checkbox at the Schema header name. 
5. Once after selecting the Schemas, click on the Run button to initiate Crawling the database connection immediately. You can alternatively select the job workflow to schedule a  Crawl action later.  
6. Once the crawl job is initiated, a success message is displayed.
   
7. To view the status of the crawl job, click on the Jobs and check the status of the Job.
   
   

   Job Status	Status Description
   INIT	Advanced Job is initiated
   RUNNING	Job is being processed
   WAITING	Submitted Job is on Queue to be processed
   SUCCESS	Job is completed successfully
   ERROR	Job has failed. Check error message in the Logs
   KILLED	The initiated Job has been killed.
   PARTIAL SUCCESS	The initiated Job has been completed partially.

8. In the Crawl window, the Last Crawl Status of the selected Schemas can be checked as mentioned below.