Version control for Tableau

Question

1. What's the best practice to control versions of Tableau projects?
2. If a change in Tableau project requires changes in the database (in my case - RedShift) and in ETL (in my case my python script), how to version control all of them together, such that I would be able to roll-back to previous version in case of a problem?

Thanks!

Answer 1

EDIT - Tableau has added version control features to Tableau Server since the time that this answer was originally provided.

1. At present Tableau Server does not provide version control functionality. There are a few ideas on the Tableau Community forum requesting integration with version control software such as Git or for version control to be baked into Tableau Server. Since Tableau workbooks are just XML files, then one could use some form of source control software for workbooks stored on a shared drive, and for publishing permissions to be restricted to a site/project admin
2. In theory a script could tie all of these components together. If a particular version of a Tableau workbook were associated with a specific database and ETL change (although I'm not sure what part the Python script plays here), then the previous version of the workbook could be retrieved from source control and republished as part of a rollback

Answer 2

Another way to accomplish the ability to rollback to previous version, is to run the native Tableau backup command just before applying any project changes. This will provide a snapshot of the server state at the time of the change.

The format is tabadmin backup backupfilename

In Tableau 8.0 and earlier, the server must be stopped first, via tabadmin stop

So your existing DB and ETL change deployment mechanism could be extended to call the backup command, and use a backupfilename that has the build or release number appended in the filename.

Running a server backup like this may not be as heavyweight an operation as you think- if your workbooks use all live connections and no cached or uploaded data, the backup command is quick and should complete in several seconds.