Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 30 | Page 86

FEATURE: ANALYTICS ///////////////// accurate aggregations. This eliminates complex coding and reduces the risk of inaccuracies encountered with traditional database joins. For example, an organisation can better plan for expected product return rates in a certain region by relating a table of sales orders with a table of historical returns, through a common zip code ID field. Relationships also make queries more efficient and performant and data sources easier to maintain. To make it easy for anyone to get started analysing their data, Tableau’s new modern data model will automatically aggregate at the appropriate level of detail for the customer’s analysis. “With Tableau’s data model improvements, we are able to work faster in our COVID-19 analysis. We have COVID-19 case data at a county level, testing data at a date level and hospital data at an institution level, and we’re overlaying census population data to normalise everything per capita,” said James Smith, Co-founder and Director at Vantage Information Services Ltd, a leading analytics consultancy. “This would have required multiple join combinations into several disparate data sources to analyse the data, but with the improvements to Tableau’s data model, we can easily relate tables in a single, flexible data source. Looking ahead, the ability to easily combine tables at different levels of granularity will save time and allow us to do more complex analysis.” NOW MORE THAN EVER, ORGANISATIONS NEED A COMBINATION OF SPEED, AGILIT AND EMPOWERMENT TO ENSUR EVERYONE IS ABLE TO MAKE DA DRIVEN DECISIONS QUICKLY. Relationships can also bring unprecedented flexibility to make data sources more efficient and accurate, only querying relevant tables to improve dashboard performance. Because multiple levels of detail are preserved in a single data source with industry-standard star and snowflake schema support, customers are able to streamline their data source management process, share combine the organisation and en analytics experience – w data sources for organis and maintain. “Historically, we have sp designing and building u models in our warehous 44 INTELLIGENTCIO