Tableau’s data visualization platform now supports Linux, promises faster operations

Tableau announced today that its new Hyper data engine is generally available to customers, providing a massive speed boost for existing processes through the company’s business intelligence and analysis software.

On top of that, the company also announced the general availability of its Linux server product, built on top of Hyper. That will allow people to run Tableau’s system on top of the popular open source operating system in addition to Windows. It’s a move that fulfills a longstanding request from the company’s users.

These two updates come at a time when Tableau faces tough competition in the business intelligence and analysis space. The company has to contend with new cloud services popping up from jar players in the tech market like Microsoft and Amazon. All of this is part of the firm’s version 10.5 release of its software.

Hyper could provide a major boost to existing Tableau customers, since it works with and speeds up the existing processes they have in place. Customers won’t have to rewrite queries in order to take advantage of the performance boost — the software is supposed to just make their existing work faster.

That Hyper engine also enables a new Viz in Tooltip feature, which allows people to see visual breakdowns of data just by mousing over parts of a dashboard. That’s important for allowing users to better understand the makeup of entries on a Tableau dashboard, without writing code to do so.

For example, users can now mouse over charts and see automatically-generated breakdowns of the numerical data behind each field in near real time, without having to write a query or take up additional dashboard space showing that information.

On top of all those features, this release also includes content governance capabilities that make it easier for customers to manage who can access different portions of the data stored inside a Tableau system.