Tableau Joins vs Relationships: A Comprehensive Comparison

Tableau is a powerful data visualization tool that allows users to create insightful dashboards and reports. One of the key features of Tableau is its ability to combine data from multiple sources using joins and/or relationships.

In this video, we'll explore the differences between Tableau joins and relationships, and when you should use each one. We'll start by discussing how Tableau defines joins and how they can be used to combine data from different tables based on a common field.

We'll do this using Excel and I'll take you step by step, line by line on what Tableau is actually doing underneath the hood.

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[PythonArms]

as an experienced tableau dev you explain this very well. love your videos. well done!

[jamiyana]

OMG EXACTLY WHAT I NEEDED!! 🥺I'm preparing for my internship (customer insights analyst) these days and found this channel. Do you have any good advice or study/practice source for someone in this field? thank you Sir!

[sudeshnasen]

Excellent explanation !!! Thanks a lot ! 😊

[saikumareppakayala]

When to go for Joins and Relationships?

[hemaprakashp]

Hi Jed, good day! do you have any videos on tableau data modelling using Azure SQL data source. i am looking for scenarios like created the relationship between One Fact table to multiple dimension tables using primary key and foreign keys. thanks in advance!

[tableauuser]

Hi, hope you have had a wonderful day so far. I have a question. I’m a freelance data analyst, and I have a client I made a report for him. I would like to know how to add him as a user to see his words on his website. Currently, he does not have a Tableau account. I have a meeting with him tomorrow, and I would like to know in advance

[AmitGrg_Rakhali]

Great explanation! and I loved your Guitar Collection! :)

[razzakahmad]

I understood the point about aggregation being done internally (and without any potential error) by tableau when using relationship over joins. But what if i make the different join instead of the ones you made. i think you made left join on those tables that is why the aggregation changed from the actual ones so instead i could do the inner join using colour as key constraint and the aggregation will still be the same as what tableau does using relationships. My point is what is the need of relationships if i can achieve the same results using the appropriate type of joins?

[Fujit_]

Thank you Jellyman for the explanation!
I have a question please: I work at a data analysis consulting agency and we want to start using tableau to build dashboards for our clients, the problem is that when it comes to sharing the dashboard we can't upload it to tableau public because the data is sensitive, if we go with the tableau online option we need to have a creator license (we already have it) but the problem is that the client also needs to pay for a viewer license to view the dashboard, we can't ask our clients to pay for that and we can't pay for it as we work with multiple clients and we need to buy a license for each one of them. Is there a solution please?

Thank you!

[isabellegfer]

Thanks! This is the best explanation I've seen so far for this subject.
I have a question: I have a dataset that I need to refresh through Tableau Bridge. When I do it with JOIN the update runs perfectly but the calculation values are incorrect, when I do it with Relationship the values are correct but the update fails. Do you know if it is possible to update data set with relationship with Bridge? What could I be doing wrong?

[saw]

Which has more performance ? Joins or Relationships?

[Finneous]

I'm not trying to be mean, but I think you explained your message clearly, but this still didn't make sense overall. I like your videos usually, but this one left me scratching my head.