0:00Hey, it's Tim here. In this video, I'm
0:02going to show you really, really quickly
0:03how to start a performance recording, and
0:06then get the performance recording workbook
0:07open. And we're just going to have a quick
0:09look at it. It's not a detailed dive deep
0:11dive into the performance recording work
0:14book. This is just showing you how to do it
0:15in desktop. I'll do another video how to do
0:17it in server as well. But for now, let's
0:20get stuck in. Okay, so here I am in Tableau
0:22. All I'm going to do is I'm going to open
0:24the sample workbook here on the bottom left
0:26. If you don't see these, don't worry, just
0:28grab any workbook whatsoever.
0:29You can get hold of, it's going to work
0:31exactly the same. Now, when you click on a
0:33workbook, when you open up a workbook, what
0:35it's actually doing is it's opening up a
0:37couple of bits of information, it's opening
0:38up the workbook file, which is essentially
0:40just XML, then it's communicating with the
0:43data source, it's querying the data source,
0:45then it's loading it. But once it's loaded,
0:47something called the vis qL engine actually
0:49renders all the visualization and puts all
0:51the information you want on screen. So that
0:54's essentially what happens when you open a
0:54workbook. Now, when you're troubleshooting
0:58a workbook, you're going to see that it's
0:58going to be a little bit more complicated.
0:58troubleshooting the workbook, sometimes
0:59maybe you've got slow
1:00performance, a performance recording is
1:02actually a really
1:03good way to sort of diagnose what's going
1:05on. Because what
1:06happens is essentially your tablet could be
1:08building a
1:09really complex query, or you could have
1:11created a calculation
1:12that's causing absolute nightmares to
1:15databases, and all
1:16your tablet workbooks. So how do you find
1:18out how long each of
1:18these behaviors is taking. So for example,
1:21when I click on
1:22this little action over here, how do I find
1:24out the
1:24performance of that interaction, when I go
1:26over here to the
1:27right hand side, and I start filtering on
1:29dates, how do I
1:30find out the load performance of that
1:32particular interaction, I
1:34could just look at it and sort of come to a
1:35conclusion that
1:36it's fast. But how do you get some sort of
1:38quantitative
1:39numbers essentially for this behavior? Well
1:41, it's actually
1:42hidden up here in the Help menu. Now
1:43depending on whether you're
1:45on Windows or on a Mac, it's looks slightly
1:47different, but
1:48it's essentially in the same place, I'm
1:49going to head up here
1:50to the Help menu, he's just behind my
1:51little annotation tool
1:52here. So if you go to help, and you'll see
1:54here, there's an
1:55option to go to Settings and Performance.
1:58Once there, at the
1:59very, very end, there's something called
2:01starting a
2:01performance reporting. And here's the
2:03important thing. Once
2:04you hit Start, it started, you don't get
2:07some sort of visual
2:08callback on the screen to say, hey, it
2:10started, you don't get a
2:11recording icon, nothing happens. You just
2:14click that button. And
2:15now it's kicked off. There's nothing on
2:17screen that will tell
2:18you that it's kicked off, you just have to
2:20trust it's kicked
2:21off. Okay. So now that you've done that,
2:23when you go back to
2:24help, the only way to know that it's
2:25actually kicked off is this
2:27will now say stop performance recording.
2:29Okay, so that's how
2:30you know, everything's kicked off. But for
2:33now, we've just
2:34started it. Now we want to do some sort of
2:36interactions. Now
2:37what I've done is when I loaded this work
2:39book, I purposely
2:40didn't go to other tabs. So you can see the
2:42load performance of
2:43those tabs, I'm going to go here to product
2:45, and it's going to
2:46have to load it. And then I'm going to go
2:48to customers. And
2:49it's going to have to load that too. And it
2:50's going to go to
2:51shipping here. And it's loading that to
2:54performance, it has to
2:55load that to forecast, it loads that very
2:57quickly. And the what
2:59if forecast is as such, now that I've cycl
3:01ed through all of them,
3:02I should have some information in the
3:04recording about each of
3:05those. Now what I'm going to do is go back
3:07to customers, and I'm
3:08going to just sort of interact with the
3:09filters just by
3:10deselecting all. And this time, I'll just
3:12select furniture, then
3:14I'll select technology. And you can see
3:15that the animation and
3:16everything sort of kicks in and select
3:18office supplies again,
3:20and that kicks in again, last thing I'll do
3:22is a deselect
3:23corporate, then deselect home office, then
3:26deselect consumer,
3:27and then select all again, just to bring
3:29everything back in. The
3:30reason I'm doing this is because some of
3:32these queries are going
3:33to be loading from the data source. And
3:36some of them are
3:36going to be cached. Essentially, a cached
3:39load is like Tableau
3:41has already got the details. It's already
3:42remembered. So for
3:44example, when I go to the shipping tab,
3:46this is a cache
3:47load because it already had information
3:49about that saved in
3:50its memory. So whenever you go back to a
3:52view that's already
3:53been previously loaded, it's not loading it
3:55from the data source,
3:56it's just loading it from its own memory.
3:58And now that we're
3:59done that we go to help, we go to settings
4:01and performance, and
4:02then we hit start performance recording.
4:04And when you do that,
4:05nothing will happen immediately. But just
4:07trust that Tableau will
4:09eventually open a workbook. If you've got a
4:10slow computer, this
4:11will take a while depending on how big your
4:13performance query
4:14was. But here we are, we've got the
4:16performance recording ready
4:17to go. And what you can see is you get this
4:20sort of it's not a
4:21greatly designed workbook, but it's
4:23actually pretty good. What
4:24you can tend to do sort of take this
4:26information out and do your
4:27own thing with it. So just stop this
4:29looking confusing, what I'm
4:30going to do, I'm just going to close the
4:31actual one that I was
4:32using for my performance recording and make
4:35this large.
4:35Now, something people often don't realize
4:38is that this
4:38filter here at the top is set sometimes all
4:41the way over here.
4:42It's not always set exactly to the far left
4:44. And the reason
4:45that is, is because some interactions are
4:47so fast, they
4:48don't even sort of clock anytime. So you'll
4:50see here that
4:51they set it to just 0.01 like that. And you
4:54can actually see
4:55the number of things that come in disappear
4:57. So those things
4:58that sort of really sort of don't matter.
5:00But if you want to
5:00see everything, just slide that to the left
5:02. And you can see
5:03this list of activities gets a lot longer.
5:06Now, as we scroll
5:07down, you can actually see the things that
5:09took the longest. So
5:10connecting to the data source took 0.62
5:13seconds, that was
5:15actually the longest activity, rendering
5:17the visualization was
5:18the next sort of most sort of intensive
5:21tasks. And then as I
5:23scroll down, what you're typically actually
5:25analyzing is
5:26the query performance. So if I was to just
5:28go in here, and
5:29select query performance, and let's just
5:32say keep on there and
5:33see if this applies to the whole hub
5:35unfortunately doesn't fill
5:37to the does that's really annoying. It
5:39doesn't fill to the
5:41charts on the left. So let's see if we can
5:45set this to do that.
5:48So it will actually highlight it, but we
5:49won't actually see
5:50it. So I've managed to find one here, which
5:53is good. So now if I
5:54click on that, you'll actually see the
5:56query. And so what
5:57essentially is happening is here, if you're
5:59connected to a
6:00live database, let's say SQL Server, Oracle
6:03or Snowflake, the
6:04query that Tableau is sending to the
6:06database is going to load in
6:08this box, okay. And this box here that we
6:10're coming from was
6:12this box here that we're drawing from is
6:14essentially just
6:15ranking how long each activity took from
6:18slowest to the
6:19fastest. Now, you will register times that
6:22are absolutely
6:23ridiculous in here, because you for example
6:25, this took 0.00.
6:26That's just because the query was
6:28exceptionally quick. So
6:30that's actually probably why they load this
6:32workbook like
6:32this, because they're trying to filter out
6:35sort of in main tasks
6:36that don't really take any any sort of
6:38amount of time. Now,
6:39this detailed view is actually quite a nice
6:41new addition. What
6:43it essentially does is it basically shows
6:45you a
6:46chronological sort of order of what's going
6:48on from the moment
6:50you started the step the test until
6:52basically the finish. So
6:53here you've got different depths, and I
6:56believe the depths
6:57are just sort of different tracks. Think of
7:00them actually
7:01says here the fact the depth view shows the
7:02high level
7:03activities at the top activities lower down
7:06are spawned by high
7:07level activities. So essentially, whatever
7:09you're
7:09doing in row one is activating some of the
7:12subsequent rows and
7:13so on and so forth. And so stuff at the
7:15bottom here is sort of
7:16activated by stuff at the top. So the
7:18performance recording
7:19here, and you've got on hover action, this
7:22this performance
7:23recording actually started back there and
7:25stopped there. That's
7:26why it's sort of a really, really long line
7:28. It's not
7:28because it's taking up a lot of resources.
7:30It's just a Gantt
7:31chart, showing you what's going on. The
7:33render activities, these
7:35are the ones at the top executing the
7:36queries sort of
7:37303 milliseconds or something like that or
7:41activities,
7:42although the processor time sorry, here is
7:450.9. So all of
7:48this information is available to you. Now,
7:49this is not an
7:50interesting workbook. It's just a normal
7:52one. If we were to
7:53connect to a live database, this this
7:55particular sheet would get
7:57more interesting because you'd get more v
7:59itals about what's
8:00going on. Anyway, I've ranted enough.
8:02Anyway, I've rambled
8:03enough about this, hopefully you find this
8:05useful. I just wanted
8:06to show you how to get at the performance
8:08recording. And then
8:09maybe in another video, we'll do a deeper
8:11dive into performance
8:12recording itself, and how to optimize
8:14performance for
8:15workbooks. So nevertheless, that's how to
8:17open up the
8:18performance recording window. Now you're
8:20done, you can
8:21actually save this workbook if you want to.
8:24And you know, take
8:25it wherever you want. Another thing people
8:27do is actually
8:28don't bother saving the workbook, but they
8:29take an extract
8:30of this particular data source. And what
8:33they do is they
8:34memorize the particular thing that they
8:37were doing. So they'll
8:38open the workbook, they'll click on a
8:40specific set of different
8:42things. And then they'll capture all the
8:44details. And then what
8:45they'll do is they'll come back to that
8:47workbook once they've
8:47performance optimized it, do exactly the
8:50same steps. And
8:51essentially just see how long all the
8:53activities take and see,
8:55okay, what have they optimized? What have
8:56they reduced? And sort
8:57of compare the two tools like Tableau prep,
9:00you can absolutely
9:01go down and maybe interrogate that further.
9:03But nonetheless,
9:04you sort of don't need to really worry
9:06about that. This is enough
9:08really, this workbook is enough to do
9:09everything you need to do.
9:11And yeah, you can just go ahead, save it,
9:13we'll save it here as a
9:14demo. Performance recording, I'll save it
9:17to my desktop demo
9:18perf recording. And now that's done, we're
9:21going to hit save.
9:23And that's it. That's a performance
9:25recording done. And
9:26we can call that a day. Now I've obviously
9:28still got the actual
9:29workbook open. If I go over here to the
9:31right hand side, you'll
9:32see that it's there. But that's it. You can
9:34do this on Tableau
9:35server. I'll show you that in another video
9:37. But for now,
9:37thanks for watching, and I'll catch you in
9:39the next one.
9:39Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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