Publish to Tableau Server Tool Performance

[GregG_NC]

I'm a user of Alteryx Designer 2019.4 and the Publish to Tableau Server tool v2.0.0.  We have Tableau Online and have been running into problems with Tableau Bridge, and I'm trying to determine if the Alteryx Publish to Tableau Server tool will be a viable replacement for publishing .hyper files to Tableau Online.  We are currently generating .hyper files in Alteryx, opening Tableau Desktop, connecting to a .hyper, and publishing the data source to Tab Online.  I'd like to remove the step of opening Tab Desktop so this can be automated.  We have 5 data sources that are each larger than 8gb.

I have been comparing the performance time to publish via the REST API (Publish to Tableau Server Tool) vs Tableau Desktop, and I've found that Tableau Desktop consistently publishes around 6 times faster than via the REST API.  I'm averaging a little over 3mbps of data upload for Tableau Desktop, and around 0.5mpbs for the REST API.  I have been testing .hyper files in the 3gb - 10gb range.

When was the last time the Publish to Tableau Server Tool was benchmarked against something else, like using the REST API in Python? If this was done, what were the findings?

Is there anything under the hood in this tool that would be slowing things down?  (e.g. throttle)

Does anyone have any tips or advice to speed up the Publish to Tableau Server tool?

I want to automate things and use this tool, but when I can publish my 5 data sources in ~4 hours using Tableau Desktop, vs ~24 hours using the REST API I don't have much of a choice.  Thanks in advance for any info/advice you can provide.

[patrick_mcauliffe]

In my experience, I'd take Alteryx over Tableau Prep any day.

Also, it seems like the process you're using has a lot of extra and manual steps.

Extracts are nice, but I've never liked the process of pushing them to the Tableau server.  That's a last resort sort of thing.  Databases are much more reliable (Alteryx --> database <-- Tableau creates scheduled extract on server)

Any reason you can't do that?

Understand that's not exactly answering your question.  From what little I know about the Tableau API, there really isn't any reason you should have a performance difference.