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!
One of the biggest areas of technical advancement in Tableau Desktop over the last several years is the ability to model complex data sources. Relationships first debuted in 2020 but were only usable for simple data models because you could only use a single fact table as a base table.
In 2024, Tableau updated the Relationship builder to allow for multiple-fact tables and shared dimension tables. This ability is invaluable in complex analyses that leverage numerous tables.
As you may know from previous videos, Relationships allow Tableau to build data models more efficiently by not unnecessarily duplicating related data like joins. Not only do relationships keep data models smaller, but they often allow you to use less memory-intensive aggregations (COUNT vs COUNTD) and reduce the need to use FIXED LOD expressions to reduce duplication.
If you want to learn how to build multi-fact relationships and learn best practices to follow when doing so, check out this video!
Need help with Tableau? Sign up for an office hour to work with Eric! You can also check out our upcoming classes for a Tableau deep dive!
Related Resources
Downloadable Data Source (Sign in to DataWorld to download)
Kirk Munroe LinkedIn (Tableau Relationship Expert)
Want to keep learning foundational skills in Tableau? Sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss new blog posts, videos and events!