By: Eric Parker
Eric Parker lives in Seattle and has been teaching Tableau and Alteryx since 2014. He's helped thousands of students solve their most pressing problems. If you have a question, feel free to reach out to him directly via email. You can follow him on LinkedIn or sign up for a Tableau Office Hour to work with him directly!
In 2020, Tableau unveiled a new way to combine multiple tables of data in Tableau Desktop: a Relationship. Billed as "smart joins", relationships provide the capability to merge multiple tables of data horizontally on shared dimensions (like a join). However, they don't duplicate data when the tables being combined have different levels of granularity.
So, are they better than joins? Not always! Relationships can reduce data duplication and improve performance, but a data set that is generated from a relationship might present blind spots if the data isn't perfectly clean.
To learn more about relationships and see a scenario where they provide a lot of value, check out this video!
Related Resources:
Want to keep learning foundational skills in Tableau? Sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss new blog posts, videos and events!