If you’re following along in our Tableau Bridge blog series, you’ve likely arrived here having identified that you’ll need Tableau Bridge to keep your on-premises or private cloud data fresh and are looking for next steps.  If so, you’re in the right place!  If you’ve not had a chance to read the first blog in this series, we recommend you start there to build a foundation for Tableau Bridge, including, “What is it?” and, “Do I need it for my deployment of Tableau Cloud?”  In this blog, we’ll discuss data source requirements for successful refresh with Tableau Bridge.

Tableau Bridge Data Considerations

Depending on the data source and your method of Tableau Bridge deployment, there are a handful of exceptions and publishing limitations to be aware of before assuming that all of your existing on-premises data source connections will be supported by Bridge.  Let’s review the connection types that Tableau Cloud does not support, those that are supported with certain caveats in a deployment on Windows, and the current limitations of deployment on Linux.

Removing Tableau Bridge from the equation, you’ll want to be aware that Tableau Cloud does not support the following connection types:

• Any Cube-based data sources
• Published connections using Kerberos authentication
• Refreshes of SAP BW data Oracle Essbase, MS PowerPivot and MS Analysis Services data (though you can publish/republish extracts to Tableau Cloud)
• Snowflake when used with Virtual Connections

Apart from these exceptions, Tableau Cloud supports most other data sources, whether connecting directly from Tableau Cloud in the case of cloud-based data sources, or through Tableau Bridge for on-premises data as we are discussing in this blog series.  We are now keenly aware that on-premises data must use Tableau Bridge for data freshness, however there are a few caveats to keep in mind.

Certain on-premises data types must be published as Extracts for refresh by Tableau Bridge, including:

• File-based data (Excel, .csv, .txt*)
• Google Cloud SQL, OData and Progress OpenEdge
• Statistical files (SAS (*.sas7bdat))
• Some private cloud-based data sources, including Google Drive, Box, OneDrive, Dropbox and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2

*See Bridge for Linux limitations as it relates to support for flat files.

Depending on the database, the following data types can generally be published as Extract or Live connections:

• Data hosted on private cloud platform such as Oracle on Amazon RDS
• Relational databases such as SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB2

And finally, keep the following in mind if you plan to deploy Tableau Bridge on Linux:

• No support for flat files (live or extract) 
• No support for OAuth 
• No support for SAP HANA SSO 
• No support for Windows (UNC) file share paths 
• No support for Window integrated authentication 

Once you’ve migrated all embedded connections to published data sources, you’re ready to install Tableau Bridge.  We’ll explore these steps in the next blog of this six-part series on Tableau Bridge. Meet you there!