by Matt Springfield | May 08, 2024

Key Takeaways from Tableau Conference 2024

The CData team truly enjoyed their time at Tableau Conference 2024, which wrapped up in San Diego last week. Upwards of 8,000 Tableau users, developers, and aficionados swept through the sunny Californian city, eager to learn, share, and participate in a vibrant conversation among likeminded data nerds. Within the San Diego Convention Center, many hundreds stopped by the CData booth to discuss data access and connectivity challenges and learn how live connectivity can make their jobs easier.

We had great conversations, watched engaging presentations, fiddled with the usual expo hall trinkets and toys, witnessed an almost-9^th-inning-comeback by the Padres game, danced in the harbor, and tasted a small sampling of everything San Diego has to offer. Let’s talk about it!

What’s the word on the show floor?

The highlight of the week for us must be the quality of conversations that we shared with hundreds of show-goers at the CData booth in the expo hall. At CData, we can support nearly any strategy for solving data connectivity challenges, so we love getting to hear our booth visitors paint their organization’s vision for data storage, bridging data silos, and data warehousing.

Our booth headline makes a bold statement – real-time Tableau access to data from anywhere. We enjoyed the handful of wry “anywhere anywhere?” responses, and were happy to clarify that yes, we can ensure direct access to Jira, Workday, Sage Intacct, and more from within your existing Tableau environment.

Through our exploration of attendee’s needs and CData’s corresponding offerings, we found that a typical data analyst gripe goes something like this:

“Yeah, we’ve got a data warehousing strategy, but man it takes forever for the engineering team to make adjustments or add new data sources. You’re saying we could bypass those demands on IT and access the data directly?”

It’s genuinely fun to see the (slightly disbelieving) spark in someone’s eyes as they realize that an annoying part of their job is, in fact, unnecessary. Yes, at CData we can support data warehousing for analysts not just through our data pipeline tool CData Sync, but also through direct connections between Tableau and all the cloud or premises platforms that you use.

Giant foosball genius

If you’ve played foosball, the parlor table-game involving kicking around a miniaturized soccer ball, then you might think that the opportunities for innovating on the game’s formula are limited. But let me tell you, quadrupling the length of the table is genius. No, really.

In-between rounds of dashing up and down the absurd length of this groundbreaking foosball table at the exhibition hall, we found time for the indoor swing set, the silly photo booth, and an encounter with a big plushy pink dinosaur.

As usual, there was a high demand for socks and other booth trinkets. CData’s own portable phone chargers were a big hit, especially as the days wore on. If you were there and picked one up, don’t forget to scan the QR code on it!

Sunny San Diego

After work hours, the energy and excitement of TC 2024 carried into a wide variety of conference events: A San Diego Padres game networking event we co-sponsored with our wonderful partners Monte Carlo, a dance party in the harbor with DJ Dave and Austin Millz, and fancy nosh at the San Diego Wine & Culinary Center through our partnership with Carahsoft.

Personally, I love to dance, so Tuesday night in the harbor made my week. My colleagues, associated by force with my dancing, perhaps preferred the baseball game.

Outside of conference-connected events, we enjoyed moonlighting around the Gaslamp district for some quality leisure time. Between the booth conversations, the expo hall attractions, and the nighttime revelry, it was a week to remember for the CData team.

On to San Fran!

No rest for the weary, the CData team will be crossing the country again in a few weeks to exhibit at the Snowflake Conference in San Francisco. Catch us at the Moscone Center June 3-6 and say hello!

In the meantime, if you’re following up on data connectivity in Tableau, feel free to play around with a free trial of CData Connect Cloud, your one-stop-shop for live Tableau access to data from anywhere (yes, anywhere anywhere).