Yet a third reaction has come to Tableau’s announcement that it has acquired HyPer, the German “high performance database system.”
“It seems sort of muddled,” wrote Dave Wells in email to me yesterday. He’s a longtime Tableau observer, a 40-year IT veteran, and now a consultant and educator at Infocentric. For six years, he was the TDWI education director.
“I’m not really clear what’s going on,” he wrote in email to me, “but it is reasonable to believe that Tableau has something up their sleeve and may be trying to bring a game changer to the market and get back the dominant position that seems to have slipped a bit.”
He sees how several of the new capabilities Tableau expects from the HyPer integration might be helped by such a system, such as faster analysis of all sizes of data and better support for semi-structured and unstructured data.
To one new capability, “enhanced data integration, data transformation, and data blending,” he comments, “They do need to catch up with the data preparation wave. But I’m not sure how a database does that.” He thinks it might add machine-learning capabilities that are central to self-service data preparation.
Overall, it looks to him like there’s something missing. He wrote, “It seems like there must be something more to the technology than what is generally visible.”
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