The shift toward the cloud is continuing apace with the launch of a major update to Tableau Software Inc.’s cloud-based implementation of its data visualization platform that promises to provide an improved experience for business workers. The biggest improvements, however, are under the hood.

The way that Tableau Online 9.0 processes requests has been enhanced to take advantage of several performance optimizations borrowed from the world of distributed databases, chief among which is the ability to spread the work across all of the processors in a given server. That’s a basic but potentially hugely important feature that the service is putting to use with the complementary addition of vectorization.

The technique is another staple feature of many scale-out systems such as Apache Hive that involves accessing multiple rows of data for an operation instead of one at a time, thereby reducing the number of actions needed to retrieve the required information and thus the associated overhead. That enables Tableau Online to make the most out of the increased processing speed enabled through the parallelization down the stack.

The company says that the combination of the two, along with a couple of smaller optimizations added in conjunction, allows the new iteration of the service to execute queries up to ten times faster than its predecessor. That’s a huge improvement that can come particularly handy for querying large datasets, a use case that is becoming increasingly common as companies hook up more information sources to their analytic processes.

Tableau Online 9.0 not only supports such scenarios but promises to actively foster the incorporation of new data into visualizations​ through connectors for the managed relational databases on Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services. The additions join existing integrations for a number of other services including Salesforce.com, which has also been improved, and a new synchronization feature meant to make it easier for analysts to import information from their in-house systems.

The expanded support for on-premise processes also extends to the security side with a new authorization option that allows administrators to use profiles from their Active Directory installations instead of setting up permissions from scratch. That rounds out the landmark update, which marks the latest milestone in the company’s efforts to make Tableau Online more appealing to its nearly 30,000 customers, less than a tenth of whom are currently using the service.

That’s not ideal in a time when the entire industry is shifting toward the public cloud, including the competition, with rival Qlik Technologies Inc. having launched a data visualization service of its own only last month. Tableau has a clear lead both in terms of active users and – no less importantly – the amount of time spent polishing its offering, but continued investment will be needed to meet its goal of not only maintaining but growing that momentum over the quarters and years to come.
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