Deeper into the Tableau Repository Part 1: The Basics

Over the years I have leveraged the Tableau Repository to do all sorts of things. I have found some articles here and there but thought I would share some that I haven't seen before. Since there will be a few (hopefully lots) I am going to do a series that will get deeper into the repository than you should probably go, but we are doing this for informational purposes and fun only.

Some of the topics I have that you should see in the next few months will include:

• Part 2: Sharing repository data with users
• Part 3: Importing AD groups the easier way.
• Part 4: Let users know what is happening with their content. 
• Writing to the repository to change things from the backend.

Any topics people really want to see?

Into the breach. The Tableau Repository  is well documented and I am not going to re-write the manual. Basically run a command to set the password for the readonly user (or the tableau user if you want only access to basic info).

tsm data-access repository-access enable --repository-username readonly --repository-password <PASSWORD>

After the server restarts you can query it with Tableau Desktop or any SQL tool that works with PostgreSQL. Note the port is 8060 not the standard PostgreSQL port. 

Things to know:

Views
Back in the old days we only had the tableau account for the repository and it could only access views (they start with an underscore). Some of these can still be useful. For example _users contains details that you would normally have to pull from users and system_users. 

Permissions

The NextGen permissions tables (nextgen_permissions, capabilities, roles, etc.) are fairly new but really powerful. It used to be really hard to figure out who had access to what. Not it is easier, but still not easy. 

Data Retention
The historical tables purge events after 183 days by default. If you want to look back farther or have to keep the records for compliance make sure you change it.

tsm configuration set -k wgserver.audit_history_expiration_days -v <number of days>