Tableau

We use Crystal Reports but use Tableau for data analysis. Most of our data for Tableau is staged in a SQL Server data warehouse. Tableau is an awesome data analysis tool that can support a variety of users allowing users to do some ad-hoc or simply interact with a dashboard created by a developer.

Thanks Julia - glad to hear you find it useful. Are you able to hit your Lawson database with Tableau directly - if so what type of database is your Lawson in (SQL, Oracle, iSeries)?

Our LAWSON is Oracle and I have not tried direct access from Tableau but do not see why it would be an issue.  We create views in Oracle and dump into tables on SQL Server and Tableau accesses those tables.  Primary reason for this is not wanting to impact the production database.  We also do our joining in SQL and then create Tableau data extracts from the tables and publish those to Tableau server.

Thanks Julia - great info!

This thread is a few years old but we've just started experimenting with Tableau. I've connected to our Lawson test server via ODBC but I'm wary of connecting to production because I don't know if it will cause undue stress on the server. In other words I don't want to crash production. We don't have any Lawson data stored on a separate SQL server that I could access with Tableau. I do use Crystal on production via ODBC without issue.