Tableau desktop has been painfully slow for me lately, no matter how big or small the twbx is. I'm currently working with a spoofed data source that pulls from a database connection. The source is only 500 rows, but it takes 10 minutes to add a dimension to a sheet. It also takes 30+ minutes to create an extract for this same source. This would make sense if I was working with millions of records, but not 500.
Does anyone have recommendations for speeding up desktop? Do I need to delete local files to improve performance? Could this be a communication issue between tableau and the database? Any pointers are appreciated.
You haven't said how Tableau performs once your 500 row extract has finally been created.
One reason might be that the database you're querying is busy, and your queries to it are being queued. When generating an extract, it will tell you how many rows it has retrieved once the database starts returning them. If your screen says, "Executing Query", then it's waiting for the database to respond, and you're probably in a queue (assuming your 500 row query is incredibly quick to run). If it says "Rows Retrieved: 4...... 5................. 6", then there's something else (and probably bad) going on. If you're running from a live connection on a semi-busy database, then even changing a filter on a dashboard could take a while, especially if you're using Custom SQL and anything like "Only show relevant values" which will require additional queries to be submitted (and queued) for every filter field using that.
