📊 Dashboards and Datalakes with Tableau

December 29, 2017

Event: University of Minnesota Tableau User Group
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Date: October 2017
Organization: Food Protection and Defense Institute (FPDI)

In October 2017, I had the opportunity to speak at the University of Minnesota Tableau User Group in Minneapolis, MN. My presentation, "Dashboards and Data Lakes with Tableau," shared our team’s approach to centralizing data from distributed sources into a scalable data lake and embedding Tableau dashboards into web applications. The talk highlighted technical insights, governance challenges, and lessons learned from implementing visual analytics at the Food Protection and Defense Institute (FPDI).

🔧 Topics Covered

• Building a centralized data lake using Cloudera on AWS
• Creating and embedding Tableau dashboards for stakeholders
• Enabling real-time data visualization with Impala and ODBC connectors
• Governance and access control for secure sponsor views
• Technical limitations of embedded authentication and data source updates

🧠 Lessons Learned

• Interactivity and usability are key for stakeholder engagement
• Embedding dashboards comes with security and integration challenges
• Clean taxonomy and governance are essential for cross-functional data lakes

🔗 Tools Used

• AWS for cloud elasticity
• Cloudera for governance and SQL access
• Impala for fast interactive queries
• Tableau for dashboard design and embedding

📄 Download: dashboards-and-datalakes-with-tableau.pdf

Categories: presentations

Tags: analytics, data, visualization