Our team at Shipyard has been hard at work developing native low-code Blueprints for tools across the data space. Our customers are building out orchestration Fleets that extract, load, and transform their data, but what good is clean data if you cannot analyze it and share it with your stakeholders?

Introducing our Tableau Blueprints

We are happy to announce that Shipyard now has 4 new low-code Blueprints to complete your orchestration pipeline with a BI layer using Tableau. The combination of Shipyard and Tableau will allow your team to trigger a refresh of data inside of Tableau when it is ready in your pipeline and download views to share with your stakeholders.

By providing your credentials along with information about the specific project, you can mix and match Blueprints to:

• Trigger a Datasource refresh
• Trigger a Workbook refresh
• Check a refresh for its final status
• Download a View to a PNG, PDF, or CSV file

Refresh without Bottlenecks

In Shipyard, you can create a workflow that triggers a refresh inside of Tableau as soon as the data is prepared for it. Your team will no longer have to guess about when the data will be ready with a schedule-based workflow. Instead, Shipyard will begin the Tableau refresh process as soon as the upstream process is complete.

Avoid Refreshing Bad Data

Shipyard will also prevent Tableau from starting the refresh process if an error occurs upstream which can protect your stakeholders from getting bad data or breaking an entire View. If an upstream error happens, you can schedule an automated alert to go out through Slack or email which will inform your team while you fix the issue. Your time can be spent focusing on fixing the issue with the peace of knowing that your stakeholders are aware that an issue has occurred with the data refresh.

Provide Stakeholders with a View

Using the Check Job Status Blueprint, Shipyard also allows you to know the exact moment Tableau has fresh data. As soon as that Vessel completes running, the Download View blueprint can be used to send a fresh View to your stakeholders in Slack or email. You can even upload the View to cloud data storage (S3, GCS, Box) to have a snapshot of the View after every refresh. Your stakeholders can be sure that their Tableau View is up to date with Shipyard.

Connect All of Your Data Tools

A BI tool like Tableau is often forgotten about when planning an orchestration pipeline. This problem is especially prevalent when Tableau is used by a different team than the team who is controlling the ETL process. This split can often cause Datasources or Workbooks to not have the most updated data that is available. A data analyst will schedule their refresh in Tableau when the orchestration process is typically finished. If anything about the workflow before Tableau takes longer than usual than the refreshed data may not include the new data or even error and cause the View to not display at all.

Here's a few examples of how you can connect Tableau to other services to create a seamless solution for your Data Team:

• Trigger a Datasource refresh after a dbt Cloud or dbt Core job is successful.
• Send an email notification to stakeholders when an upstream process fails causing a delay for the Tableau refresh.
• Send Slack alerts when a Tableau refresh is complete allowing the team to know exactly when data is ready for them.
• Upload daily snapshots of a View to a S3 bucket.

Get Started Today

Tableau Blueprints are now available to all users and can be tested with any account. Sign up for our free Developer Plan to start automating your data orchestration process with Tableau.

We're looking forward to seeing how users will take advantage of this functionality to quickly launch, monitor, and share data pipelines!

About Shipyard:
Shipyard is a modern data orchestration platform for data engineers to easily connect tools, automate workflows, and build a solid data infrastructure from day one.

Shipyard offers low-code templates that are configured using a visual interface, replacing the need to write code to build data workflows while enabling data engineers to get their work into production faster. If a solution can’t be built with existing templates, engineers can always automate scripts in the language of their choice to bring any internal or external process into their workflows.

The Shipyard team has built data products for some of the largest brands in business and deeply understands the problems that come with scale. Observability and alerting are built into the Shipyard platform, ensuring that breakages are identified before being discovered downstream by business teams.

With a high level of concurrency and end-to-end encryption, Shipyard enables data teams to accomplish more without relying on other teams or worrying about infrastructure challenges, while also ensuring that business teams trust the data made available to them.

For more information, visit www.shipyardapp.com or get started with our free Developer Plan.