I love preparing and cleaning data – said No one!

Data Preparation is the most abhorred task that causes nightmares to data scientists. According to IDC, data scientists spend 26 hours per week cleaning and preparing the data for analysis. No wonder data preparation evokes such strong feelings among the data community.

Fortunately, there is a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of self-service data preparation tools such as Tableau Prep, Alteryx, Power BI Dataflow and more. These tools mitigate the pain and simplify data preparation. According to Gartner, data preparation tools will be key in 70% of the data integration projects by 2023.

In this article, we will focus on one such data preparation tool: Tableau Prep. We will look at how to prepare and clean your financial, sales, or HR data stored in Oracle BI (OBIEE) with Tableau Prep and BI Connector.

Let’s look at a typical use case

Imagine you work at the global headquarters of a Fortune 1000 company. Your boss wants you to analyze the product orders and returns from the European division. The order data is captured in your OBIEE data warehouse, and then returns data is available separately, in a spreadsheet. You need to join the two data sets. Since OBIEE can be difficult to use, you plan to use Tableau Desktop to analyze the OBIEE data. But when you start to analyze both sets of data in Tableau, you notice that both require some cleanup. And that’s where Tableau Prep and BI Connector come to your rescue.

A brief intro to Tableau Prep

Before you can perform your visual analytics wonders in Tableau Desktop, you need to pay your dues to the data by preparing and cleaning it. Tableau Prep is the tool that helps you with the data preparation. You can clean, shape and prepare the data with Tableau Prep. You can check out the tutorials here.

The tool to connect Tableau Prep to OBIEE

Tableau Prep added support for ODBC data sources in v2019.2. This enabled BI Connector to help users connect to OBIEE data with Tableau Prep. You can prepare data from OBIEE reports and subject areas and combine it with other data sources. You can download BI Connector here.

Steps to Connect Tableau Prep to OBIEE

Connecting Tableau Prep to OBIEE with BI Connector is similar to connecting from Tableau Desktop to OBIEE. Here are the steps:

1. You download and install Tableau Prep.
2. Download and install the latest version of BI Connector. If you have an older version, uninstall it first and then install the latest version.
3. If it is your first time using BI Connector, create your ODBC DSN for OBIEE Reports and Subject Areas with BI Connector.
4. Connect from Tableau Prep to OBIEE using the Other Datasources(ODBC) and choosing OBIEE DSN for reports.
5. Create the data flow to prepare the OBIEE data.
6. Create the data flow to prepare other datasets.
7. Combine them using join.
8. Create an output either to .hyper or .tde file.
9. Open the file in Tableau Desktop and visualize the data.

Watch the Tableau Prep to OBIEE Reports Demo

Try connecting Tableau Prep to OBIEE with BI Connector

Tableau Prep is one of the easiest tools to prepare data for analysis. BI Connector simplifies OBIEE data preparation and visual analysis. The powerful, yet easy to use a combination of Tableau Prep with BI Connector will save you time and shorten the time to insights from your data.

Download BI Connector and try it free for 30 days