Tremendous success of TC15 convinced me to return to my blog to write about Tableau’s history. Part 1 “Self-Intro” covers 2003-7 from version 1 to 3, Part 2 “Catching-up” covers 2008-10 from versions 4 to 6, Part 3 “Competition” covers 2011-13 from version 6 to 8 and Part 4 “Tableau the Leader” covers 2013-15 from version 8.1 to 9.2.
During last 25 months Tableau published 6(!) releases: 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 9.0, 9.1 and 9.2 – in average one release per 4 months, leaving competitions far behind (version 9.3 expected in Q1 of 2016 and 10.0 in the summer(?) of 2016). [For comparison the QLIK released only one new update (Qlikview 12 in December of 2015) in last 4 years and as result lost its leading position (I do not consider Qlik Sense as competitive product)]. By end of 2015 Tableau became the leader in sales and in number of employees, while keeping the highest YoY growth among competitors.
As true and wise leader, Tableau made its software available to millions of people for free: each student, teacher, and even each member of administration of academic organization can use it for free and each small non-profit organization can use it for free too! Tableau Public vastly increased its capacity, allowing its users to save up to 10 million rows and even protect their workbooks from download.
8.1. November 2013. Tableau finally became 64-bit (no limit for 4GB RAM now – it was way overdue) multi-threaded product and added support for SAML. Among new features: some integration with R, copy content between workbooks, Box-and-Whisker Plot:
8.2. June 2014. Native Tableau Desktop for Mac is released to please many snobs, Story Points (along with worksheets and dashboards) available now for data-storytelling (need for PowerPoint is much less now), new data connectors to text, excel, SAP HANA, Splunk, API for Google BigQuery and REST API, new Data Window:
new map designs (together with Stamen) and map server, worldwide zoom level, high DPI displays:
8.2.2. September 2014. Tableau Customer conference 2014.
8.2.5. November 2014. This historical release enabled the non-administrative user to use remote “READONLY” user (of Tableau’s administrative PostgreSQL database) to be used for creating dashboards, monitoring Tableau Server, its users, HTTP traffic, workbooks usage and data extracts.
8.3. December 2014. Added Single Sign-On and Delegated Access with Kerberos for enterprise security.
9.0. April 2015. Now you can view proximity in the radial selection tool:
Also 9.0 directly connects now to statistical files from SAS, SPSS and R, new data connectors added for Spark SQL, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Amazon Redshift, improved performance of Salesforce connector, added Data Interpreter and Pivot-split cross tab:
Tableau 9 accelerated execution of queries (enabled parallel, consolidated and reused queries, cashing), added analytics pane:
, fast marks and tooltips,
level-of-details (LOD) expressions:
Here is a video with review of Tableau 9.0 features:
Here is a demo of new LASSO selector:
9.1. September 2015. New Data Connectors: Web Data Connector, Amazon Aurora, Google Cloud SQL, Microsoft Azure, SAP BW, Tableau SDK for creating and publishing data extracts (C, C++, Python, Java). Also free iPad app “Vizable” was part of 9.1 release and announced on TCC15.
9.2. December 2015. Tableau 9.2 added new Tableau Mobile app for iPhone (still Android was ignored!), added integration with Mapbox:
Added hierarchical treemaps; placement of totals at top, bottom, left and right; using any worksheet as filter:
and making permission granularity not just for workbooks and datasources, but for projects as well.
I wish a Happy New Year to all visitors of this blog, to members of Tableau Community and to 2016 Tableau Zen Masters:
and of course I wish Tableau 10.0 to be released as soon as possible, because I hope to get rid of all this
idiotic data blending,
which Tableau forcing us to do for many years and I wish to start using cross-DB join statements, cross-DB filters and everything cross-DB (it was promised on TCC15!). And I hope eventually Tableau will implement its own internal in-memory database with support for columnstore (that will take away from QLIK the last argument it has).
Data Visualization 
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