Update 16 June 2016 – this has been superseded by the V10.0 edition, available here. Unless you are specifically looking for V9 advice, you should use the new document. Even if you aren’t the new version is probably a better resource with updated structure and content.
Well, it’s finally done.
Designing Efficient Workbooks V9
Thanks to all the people whose hard work has contributed to this document, and to all the reviewers whose input has helped make this approachable.
This will be available via the Tableau blog soon, but this is for the early adopters. Enjoy!
The Last Data Bender 
You’re a superstar Alan! Thanks for making such an incredible resource available.
Thanks a lot! Fantastic!
This is my most referred to Tableau whitepaper. Thanks for taking the time to update it, Alan. Wonderful work.
Thanks, George. Appreciate the feedback and glad the doc is useful.
The tableau bible.. Thanks for spending the time and effort to share your knowledge with all of us. Offering a deep understanding of how to fully utilize and optimize Tableau
Hi Alan, nice work, this is so great.
Congratulation
Alan , I see that Tableau has very good documentation library for starters but your PDF is really exceptional effort that too loaded with a lot of graphics. Really helpful kind of cheat sheet.
Hi Alan
Great work – a really great reference.
I was just using this doc to see if I could optimise a workbook at a client site, in particular to see if I could get some caching going. I noted that you say that server cache is not able to be used if the workbook contains parameters!!!!
If this this true, what is the point in having cache? I cant remember the last workbook I built that didn’t use parameters.
I’m sure i was seeing server cache in v8 when using params – is this new to the v9?
Craig
Hi Craig. Thanks for the question. Perhaps that line is poorly worded.
The external query cache doesn’t actually know you are using a parameter – it operates at a lower level and just uses the text of the query. If your workbook uses a parameter, changing the parameter generates a different query so you won’t hit the cache. If you don’t change the parameter you’ll hit the cache if nothing else has changed.
Hope that clarifies.
Cheers,
Alan
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I ran across this today and I want to tip my hat to you! I’m in IT and managing our Tableau project and this document has explained many things I wondered about and taught me things I did not even think of. Thank you for the effort of putting this together and the contributors. Great work!
Firstly thanks a lot for the brilliant document, it’s really very awesome. But I have a question, why did you mention that ” By default, the maximum degree of parallelism is (number of available logical processors) / 2. This means that query operations on data extracts can run up to N times faster in Tableau 9 (where N is the number of cores in the machine). ”
I don’t understand why you divide by 2 ? and if this action is performed by tableau, then the speedup would be by N/2 not just N?
Kindly help me to get this. Again thanks a lot for the great effort in the document.
Hi Mina,
I’m not sure where that note came from – the V9 document was written over 2 years ago and has since been superseded by the V10 doc. I’d guess is was from notes from our product/dev teams.
Cheers,
Alan