I love Tableau, I do NOT however, love working with Tableau when it is connected to an OLAP cube (like Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services). I don’t enjoy working with cube data in Tableau because basically all the coolest parts of Tableau won’t work or won’t work in the ways you might expect. I don’t see this as a failing of Tableau, I lay the blame on the OLAP cube. The main issue with working against a cube in Tableau is that you talk to a cube with MDX, where we talk to almost every other data source with SQL. MDX (or Mind Destroying Expressions as I think of them), are just a huge pain to work with. As hard as it is for ME to write MDX, for Tableau it’s even harder. Here are some things that you should consider before committing to a Tableau project with Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services as a data source
Click through for ten such considerations.