Ryan Robitaille

I’ve been a big fan of ElasticSearch the since last Spring. Put simply, it’s a search server based on Apache Lucene. But in all honestly, it’s really a massively scalable, auto-balancing, redundant, NoSQL data-store plus a full search and analytics server.

But, if I’m storing a ton of data in ES, I certainly can’t use Tableau, since ES querying is strictly RESTful… or can I?

Coming off the excitement of my last post about writing a simple bare-bones python usage of Tableau’s brand-new Data Extracts API from version 8.0 – I figured that it was time to build on that. Let’s take a step forward and get a little more complicated – AND a little more useful…. Let’s do this.

If you were learning (and / or partying) with us at the Tableau Customer Conference 2012 in Beautiful San Diego – then you’ve probably been playing around with the Tableau 8 Beta over the past few weeks. Tableau 8 bring a whole new slew of features – INCLUDING 2 new APIs… I’m going to go over some sample Python usage for the new ‘Tableau Data Extract’ API…

I’m always on the lookout for cool new data feeds that I can mess with – as you can clearly see from some of the other posts on this site. Usually it involves some scripting, screen-scraping, system fiddling, and general madness – basically meaning that some people can get it to work, while others cannot. […]

I’m always looking for data from unlikely sources, especially sources that are close to my own bizarre interests. Anyone who played guitar at one point or another has probably used tablature.
What if we scripted out a way to crunch through an old school tab text file, split it up in a logical way, and insert it all into a database for display / analysis…

Baseball. If is ANY sport in America that is “all about the data”, it’s baseball. Although we touched on this topic last year, I never really gave it its full round of posts that it deserves.

Well, finally that day has come – except now its even better…

Did a data refresh on 2 of my most the most popular visualizations last night – Metallica has played about 15 shows since I last ran the data-gathering routines, and Bigfoot has been reported another 40+ times! Holy cats! I also have a cool announcement for all you data-junkies out there…

We, over here at Linium, love Tableau Server. Big time. It takes quite the tool to be able to wrap around all my procedural data hacking and make it look like it came that way. Custom internal apps + Salesforce data + consultant time-tracking data + Quickbooks data etc – it all fits, works, comes […]

A fun little Viz I did about Bigfoot sightings.

Basically, I harvested all the sighting info off of The Bigfoot Field Research Organization site with Python and the Scrapemark module – inserted it into a local SQL Server database – cleaned it up and threw up a pretty looking Viz using Tableau Public.

Visualizing Squatch of the Nation!

I’m pretty happy with it – its quite interactive and hopefully someone finds it fun or interesting.