Unlock Real-Time Cross-Platform Collaboration with Delta Sharing Tableau Connector

Special thanks to Kevin Glover, Martin Ko, Kuber Sharma and the team at Tableau for their valuable insights and contributions to this blog.

Organizations need to share data with their partners, customers, and suppliers to foster collaboration and drive innovation. However, the reality of accessing, sharing and securing these diverse and often siloed datasets across data platforms often creates friction and complexity, blocking collaboration. To address this, Databricks and the Linux Foundation introduced Delta Sharing, the first open source protocol for platform-agnostic data sharing, enabling organizations to securely extend collaboration beyond their data platforms and organizational boundaries.

Delivering on the original promise of enabling data sharing across platforms and democratizing data-driven insights, Databricks and Tableau recently expanded their partnership and introduced the new Delta Sharing Tableau connector at the Tableau Conference 2024 in April. This past June, we also shared the massive growth of the Delta Sharing open ecosystem with 16,000+ data recipients that have adopted Delta Sharing, with 300%+ YoY growth. In addition, 40% of active Delta Shares use our cross-platform open connectors including Tableau as well as others from Apache Spark™, Pandas, and Power BI to access and read shared data.

In this blog, we’ll review how the new data connector seamlessly leverages the powerful foundation of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform alongside Tableau's advanced data visualization platform expanding the open ecosystem for business intelligence use cases. With the Delta Sharing Tableau connector, organizations can easily share live data with their external partners and consume it directly in Tableau to facilitate real-time, data-driven decision-making.

"Together, we’re delivering a powerful data-sharing capability to help customers seamlessly share data between Tableau and Databricks. Real-time sharing quickly refreshes analyses, helping teams collaborate and make data-driven decisions based on the most up-to-date information.”

— Kevin Glover,  Director, Product Management, Tableau

Delta Sharing is Open, Flexible and Secure

The Delta Sharing Tableau connector is made possible by Delta Sharing’s open protocol, which was designed with several key benefits, including open, cross-platform sharing, and sharing live data with no replication. These key capabilities allow data recipients to directly consume data using their preferred tools, without needing to deploy a new platform. The protocol is based on the Parquet and Delta data formats and a simple REST API, which simplifies the implementation of adding any compatible connectors. For a data recipient, receiving a Delta Share is also quick and easy, and as straightforward as installing a Python library.

This open design has fostered a thriving, open ecosystem of Delta Sharing connectors. Over the past year, thousands of organizations have adopted these connectors — which include Python (pandas), Apache Spark™, Excel, Node.js, and R to consume shared data from Databricks — to connect with a variety of data platforms — such as Amazon EMR, Google BigQuery, and Snowflake. Today, Delta Sharing is empowering mission-critical, large-scale applications across industries, from privacy-safe collaboration in retail to achieving customer 360-degree views for marketing campaigns, all supported by an open data sharing ecosystem. The new Delta Sharing Tableau connector supports the open principles of Delta Sharing, now extending its capabilities to all Tableau customers.

Accelerate Real-Time Insights with Tableau + Delta Sharing

All of this cross-platform interoperability is valuable, but its true worth is realized when end users can see and understand the data. That's where Tableau's advanced data analytics and visualization platform comes into play. Users can connect directly to the shared data from Delta Sharing within Tableau Desktop and Server, allowing them to explore the freshest data at scale, and quickly draw insights and inform decision-making, fostering a data-driven culture for cross-organizational collaboration. It is now fully integrated with Tableau’s data management features, including Tableau Prep and Tableau Catalog, providing comprehensive data management and analytics solutions.

Amperity, a leader in Customer Data Platforms (CDP) has already started rolling out the Delta Sharing Tableau connector to its customers—regardless of whether they use Databricks or not—integrating it into its platform to support their customers’ needs now and into the future. 

"Our experience has been really smooth... The Delta Sharing Tableau connector means our customer can simply select their data tables, download the credential, and get to work immediately. It is a game changer.”

— Caleb Benningfield, Principal Architect, Amperity

“Our experience with Delta Sharing has been really smooth. One of the friction points in serving enterprise companies is not just technical complexity, but organizational complexity," explains Caleb Benningfield, Principal Architect at Amperity. "Before we had this connector, we would need to copy the data into a data warehouse and provision access, or our customer would have to do that. This could mean that a marketing analyst would have to first submit a request to IT to get things set up. This request can actually delay a project for weeks (or more). The Delta Sharing Tableau connector means our customer can simply select their data tables, download the credential, and get to work immediately. It is a game changer.”

Apart from helping streamline access for their customers to quickly analyze their data, Amperity uses embedded report features, providing custom Tableau dashboard templates for their customers. These dashboard views help support many specific industry use cases, such as viewing an organization's historical revenue, predicted future revenue, customer growth and customer health dashboards, loyalty growth, and campaign performance.

Easily share live data with external partners, manage it in Tableau

For data providers, the connector expands the reach of your data by meeting end users where they are on Tableau without sacrificing security while leveraging the built-in data governance from Unity Catalog. For data consumers using Tableau, the connector provides easy access to the rich Delta Sharing data ecosystem, including data from the Databricks Marketplace. This makes it effortless to tap into a vast array of shared data sources.

Key Business Use Cases Reduce Time-to-Insights

To understand the value of the Delta Sharing Tableau connector, consider a retailer that wants to share transaction data across domains with a data analyst at one of its suppliers who uses Tableau for data visualization. If the retailer doesn’t store their data in an open cross-platform platform such as Delta Sharing, they would face two cumbersome options:

• Option 1: If the data platform offers a proprietary, closed data sharing solution, the analyst would be required to adopt the same platform. This would involve months of coordination with IT, security, and procurement teams to deploy the product.
• Option 2: Build an ETL pipeline to replicate the data into the analyst’s environment. This would require additional engineering investment to build and maintain the pipeline, and the replica could become stale unless it is constantly refreshed.

With the Delta Sharing Tableau connector, the data analyst can now directly – yet securely access shared data within Tableau without needing to deploy a specific platform or building a complex ETL pipeline, and the retailer can centrally govern the shared data in one place regardless which data tool their collaborators are using. This greatly simplifies collaboration between the two parties, reducing time to insight from months to minutes.

Getting Started with Delta Sharing to Tableau 

To get started with the Delta Sharing Tableau connector, you can download the connector on the Tableau Exchange and follow the instructions in the technical documentation.  You can also learn more about the new connector by watching the recent “Delta Sharing: Open Protocol For Secure Data Sharing (OSS)” session at the Data + AI Summit 2024.

To learn more about how Delta Sharing can help your organization, check out the latest resources including new eBooks and related blogs below.

• Read A New Approach to Data Sharing, Second Edition eBook
• Read Accelerate Industry Innovation with Data Sharing eBook

If you are already a Delta Sharing customer, you can also reach out to the team with questions or to provide feedback at datasharing [at] databricks.com.