Announcing General Availability of Explore in Tableau

We’re excited to announce the General Availability of Explore in Tableau, a new integration that lets you create Tableau Cloud visualizations directly from Unity Catalog in just a few clicks. This feature simplifies catalog integration and data model syncing, allowing you to send datasets to Tableau Cloud without manual setup.

Unity Catalog acts as a single source of truth for your organization’s data and AI assets, providing open connectivity to various data sources, unified governance with lineage tracking, comprehensive monitoring and access controls, and support for open sharing and collaboration. This ensures that data remains accessible, well-governed, and ready for analysis across teams.

Explore in Tableau integrates seamlessly with Tableau Cloud, making it easier to generate insights. It ensures that your data is always accessible, governed, and ready for visualization.

With Explore in Tableau, you can create Tableau visualizations without switching back and forth between Databricks and Tableau. This removes friction from the process and makes it easier to explore and analyze data.

Before Explore in Tableau

Traditionally, connecting Databricks to Tableau Cloud required either:

• Manually connecting Databricks to Tableau Cloud and finding the right catalog, schema, and tables for analysis
• Downloading and uploading a .tds file to Tableau Cloud

These steps were time-consuming and prone to errors.

Now, with Explore in Tableau

• Direct integration: Open datasets in Tableau Cloud directly from the Databricks UI
• No manual connection management: Connections and credentials are handled automatically
• Always up to date: Easily refresh data to reflect the latest changes in Unity Catalog

This streamlined approach helps teams move faster and focus on insights rather than setup.

Streamlined Exploration Experience: How It Works

Exploring a dataset in Tableau Cloud is now as simple as a few clicks:

1. Navigate to your desired schema or table in Unity Catalog
2. Click "Use with BI tools" or "Open in a dashboard"
3. Click “Explore in Tableau Cloud”
4. Login to Tableau Cloud

Within seconds, your data source for Tableau will be available and ready for dashboard creation or ad hoc analysis.

We’re continuing to enhance Explore in Tableau and plan to extend this feature to Tableau Server in the future. Stay tuned for updates!

Getting Started with Explore in Tableau

Explore in Tableau is now available to all Databricks customers. To get started, ensure you have the necessary permissions in both Databricks and Tableau, then open your Databricks workspace, navigate to Unity Catalog and look for the "Explore in Tableau Cloud" button.

For detailed instructions and best practices, check out our technical documentation.

To learn more about integrations between Databricks and Tableau, download the eBook here.