Tableau Readies New Release Of Its Data Visualization Software With In-Memory Data Engine, Linux Support

Tableau Software is giving customers and partners a look at the next release of its data analysis and visualization software today, including a new in-memory data engine, a new data preparation product and a new API for building extensions to the software's dashboard.

Tableau is demonstrating the capabilities of the upcoming Tableau 10.5 at its annual customer conference in Las Vegas this week with more than 14,000 customers and partners in attendance.

The company is also demonstrating the new self-service analytics and data source certification capabilities of Tableau 10.4, which just shipped September 25.

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The conference is being held in Las Vegas one week after a gunman, firing from a room in the Mandalay Bay hotel, killed 58 people attending a country music festival across Las Vegas Boulevard.

Tableau said it is dedicating this week's conference, being held at the Mandalay Bay, to the victims, their families, first responders and those who worked in the aftermath of the shootings.

The company is raising funds for the National Compassion Fund to support the victims and their family. And a vigil service is scheduled for Tuesday evening.

"We look forward to finding strength in our engaged and mission-driven community this week," said Elissa Fink, Tableau's chief marketing officer, in a statement before the conference.

At the event Tableau will announce that Tableau 10.5 is now in public beta.

"Data leads to truth. In the absence of data, that vacuum gets filled by myths," said Tableau president and CEO Adam Selipsky in a keynote Tuesday, introducing Tableau 10.5.

The Tableau Server in the upcoming release will, for the first time, run on the Linux operating system. Until now the server has only supported Windows Server. The Linux support will give businesses and organizations that already use Linux more flexibility in deploying Tableau.

Hyper, the new in-memory data engine technology in Tableau 10.5, is also in public beta. Hyper will be capable of working with half a billion rows of data in sub-seconds, according to the company, improving data extract creation and query performance. It will also provide a way to deploy Tableau to a greater number of users without impacting performance.

With the new Extensions API developers, including ISVs and solution provider partners, can develop extensions to Tableau dashboards that will allow users to integrate and work with third-party applications directly in Tableau.

Alation, which develops data catalog software for collaborative analytics, data governance and other tasks, is one Tableau ISV partner whose product will take advantage of the Extensions API. The 10.5 demonstration in Tuesday's keynote included showing how the context of the Alation Catalog can be embedded directly in a Tableau dashboard using the Extension API.

And Tableau will be demonstrating new data preparation software codenamed Project Maestro that will be available as a public beta later this quarter. The software will make it easier for users to combine, clean and transform data from disparate sources for analysis, operationalize data flows, and share their work across an organization.