A client of ours was experiencing extremely slow workbook publishing times to their Tableau Server. The part of the process which was causing this slowness was the creation of extracts for data sources used in the workbook.
My esteemed colleague Peter Gamble-Beresford came up with the following solution. I've been meaning to document this for a while and thought publishing as a blog post might help others experiencing the same issue.
The logic behind this workaround is to publish the workbook with empty extracts. Once published to the server the extract is refreshed - using the server machines power instead of the laptop publishing the workbook.
Please see the below steps for this workaround:
Create a Boolean parameter with similar configuration to this:
2. Create a calculation which holds the parameters value
3. Use this calculation in an extract filter and exclude 'True'. This is the value for 'Empty' and so when set to this and an extract refresh is ran the extract will be empty as it excludes every row.
4. Run an extract refresh and then publish the workbook to your Tableau Server.
5. Once the workbook has been published you will need to web edit the workbook and change the 'Create empty extract?' parameter to 'Full' (False) and publish.
6. When the parameter in the workbook has been changed and republished you can run an extract refresh which will cause Tableau server to perform and full extract refresh of the data (providing the server can access the data source).
Ta-da! Hopefully this tip will save you a lot of time when publishing workbooks with hefty data extracts!