Building a Data Viz & Tableau Culture at Facebook

Andy Kriebel Data Viz Guru - Facebook Cincinnati Business Intelligence & Analytics Meetup August 19, 2014

A little bit about you…

How long have you been using Tableau?

How many meetups have you attended?

What do you want to know?

My first Tableau project

It started with a simple question

How are teams planning budgets vs. goals?

And we’d like to see a dashboard

1 hour from that Google search…

30 minutes after that…

The next day, we identified problems!

Teams were now accountable!

There are now 93 TUGs!

Who has been to Facebook?

Let’s go on a tour...

1.3 billion

4.5 billion

325 million per day

140 billion friend connections

What is big data to you?

Facebook’s Big Data

• 300 petabytes of data in Hive • 600 terabytes incoming daily

Size is relative

What works for Facebook might not work for you

“Our problem is not a lack of data, it’s our inability to make sense of what we have.”

Stephen Few: Tableau Customer Conference 2008

Our legacy reporting stack had major gaps

MicroStrategy

• Complex and hard to master ad-hoc environment

• Dependency on developers • Needed a full-time on-site trainer

In-house tools• Lack of sophisticated data visualization or

top-notch dashboarding • Needed to be supported by in-house

engineers • Upgrades have been painful

Why did we need another tool?

What were we looking for?1. Self-service dashboards and analysis 2. Remove dependency on the BI team 3. Needed an intuitive tool for data

discovery 4. Security 5. Increase speed of development

What’s worked and what hasn’t?

We started with a multi-tenancy model…

…but that didn’t meet our needsOpen to everyone

All Access

Workbooks

View View View View

Monetization

Workbooks

View View View View

Sustainability

Workbooks

View View View View

HR & Finance

All Access

Workbooks

View View View View

Outside Access

All Access

Workbooks

View View View View

Growth & Analytics

All Access

Workbooks

View View View View

Tableau is available to EVERYONE

And the growth has been phenomenal

Facebook Groups

Set the foundation with data viz best practices

Regular, hands-on Tableau training sessions

We invite industry experts

Hackathons

We make Tableau work for us

We built an email subscription service

We created our own data portal

BI is no longer a roadblock

We tap into the postgres database

Users know the status of their extracts

We know who is viewing what

We trigger extracts only after data lands

Datacamp

VizPlateShowcase Tips & Tricks

News & Announcements

How can we support so many people?

The Architects

The Data Viz Team

We have some challenges

Dashboards vs. Analytics

Performance & scalability

Vertica implementation

Growing our team

What skills do people need?

1.Data Modeling

2.SQL

3.Coding

4.Data Viz / Tableau

If you know anyone, let me know!

We’re building some cool hacks!

Think HAXML

Dynamically update shapes

We’ve invented new chart types

Imagine Tableau Servers that do NO EXTRACTS

Imagine extracts that run 40x FASTER

Offload extract creation on distributed systems without licensing costs

And it’ll all be open sourced

Come to our talk at #DATA14Wednesday 10:45 AM

Sources of inspiration

Read lots of blogs!http://bit.ly/DataVizBlogs

Follow me!vizwiz.blogspot.com facebook.com/vizwiz

@VizWizBI

Thank you!