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.