Organizing data sources when working with multiple tables from one database

I'm working with a workbook that has a dozen or so dashboards, each showing information stored in a different table in a MS SQL Server database. The information is pre-summarized, Tableau is just displaying it to the end user.

The way this was created by the previous developer, each dashboard has its own data source, which is just the linked table. Each data source separately includes the connection information for the SQL server.

This leads to an issue whenever I want to change from Test to Prod: I have to update every single data source separately. There has to be a better way to do this - what is it?

Topic tableau

Category Data Science

1
answered at

Since these are aggregated tables, they might have similar or identical structure. If that is the case (same number of columns and same data types), you could use UNION in MS SQL Server to combine them and then connect Tableau to the results of the Union query. You would essentially have one MS SQL Server dataset to connect to.

The Union can also be done in Tableau when creating the data source. See Union Your Data.

If the tables are not identical in structure but are similar enough, you could create placeholder fields to make them conform and enable the union option.

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