Tableau and the cube - an unholy marriage

Starting in May 2019 I got an assignment in an international institution in Basel. They were hiring tableau devs and I wanted to focus my career more towards business intelligence. Since I think people should interpret with their domain knowledge, not wasting time struggling to get high quality data sets together. In the interviews I was warned that there is certain limitations with tableau working with cubes.

And my dear, yes there are. You cannot create calculated fields with dimensions. It is hard to browse through the underlaying data in the cube since tableau can only show field names and other attributes of these fields except the content. That is why we use Excel or SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio).

What's new then with a cube? Although you are limited with the calculated fields, you are able to compensate with a feature called calculated member. This MDX operated calculated field is more powerful and can also work with dimensions. This allows you to group dimensions or rename/give them an alias. Which is not working in a cube environment.

But there is hope, the experience will not be great but there is some tips and tricks I will provide in this blog. Soon more to come.

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