The past couple of days DS35 have been learning all about tableau server everything from installs, permissions on tableau server, tab admin command prompts etc. Today we looked at the tableau server repository, which is responsible for storing and managing the metadata of the Tableau workbooks, data sources, and other assets that are created and shared on the server.
This data is stored within a PostgreSQL database on the Tableau Server Repository. PostgreSQL, also known as Postgres, is a powerful, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) that is widely used for managing large data sets. It is known for its reliability, robustness, and ease of use, making it a popular choice for web and enterprise applications.
Postgres is a relational database management system, which means that it organizes data into tables, with each table consisting of a set of rows and columns. This structure makes it easy to work with and understand data, as well as to create complex data relationships between tables.
One of the benefits of this database is that you can access the data directly from tableau desktop and create visualizations with a live connections provided you have the login details to your organizations database.
You can see in the above picture an example of tableau desktop connected to the postgres database and all the different tables that come through.
Here is a link to all the available tables in PostgreSQL and a data dictionary which explains what each column is:
https://tableau.github.io/tableau-data-dictionary/2022.3/data_dictionary.htm
Using this data I created a visualization of the user traffic that goes to different views:
Not the best dashboard I made as most of the time was spent trying to understand the data model and create a correct data source. However it does provide an example of just how much can be found out by analyzing this metadata.