Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Tableau Customer Conference 2014

I am back to work, emails are caught up, and life is back to normal.

I would like to start out by saying I had a great time. This was my fourth Tableau Conference and they have all been great experiences. The number of people has exploded. Attendance has quadrupled since I started going and I felt like a veteran with my "4 years" sticker on my badge. Occasionally I would run into someone with a larger number but I felt like I was surrounded by people just starting to use Tableau. This is all great. It is nice to see more people using such a great tool.

One thing that really baffles me is that I have been going to the conference longer than many of the Tableau employees. The growing pains this year were obvious. It is really tough to estimate how many people will want to go to a session; many of the sessions I wanted to attend had a line and maxed out well before the start time. There were similar issues at #TCC12, but not #TCC13.



Some of the new features announced for 8.3 and 9 look like they are going to be really useful. ETL is especially a pain point for many users. Performance is another area we run into and the persistent cache that is shared across processes will be really helpful at work.

I was able to attend a lot of great sessions and gather a bunch of great information. I can't wait until the videos are available for the sessions I couldn't make or were full. I was really torn between Andy Cotgreave's 100 years of Brinton talk and the Iron Viz Championship. I finally decided the the Brinton talk would be fine in recording, but Iron Viz had to be experienced. I hadn't made it a priority at any of the other conferences and was glad I was able to go. I think we need to do one here at work.

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