Controlling On-demand Mirror Table Production

Managed workbooks created by Tableau 8.2 or later benefit from faster mirror times; Xpress Insight detects which tables are required by the Tableau view and populates just those tables. This default behavior should be suitable for most apps and is unlikely to need further configuration.

However, for unmanaged or pre-Tableau 8.2 workbooks all mirror tables are populated. The mapping between Tableau views and mirror tables can instead be configured. First set the mirror detection to manual for the affected workbook. Then augment the mirror table definition with a sync-for-tableau-views element to control precisely which views cause its population.

The example below configures the facility_clients table to only be populated for all views in the Analysis workbook and the Summary view in the Forecast workbook. If the user opens another view in the Forecast workbook then this table would not be populated, thereby improving the responsiveness of that Tableau view.

<database-mirror table-prefix="facility_" 
                 sync-after-execution="false">
  <mirror-tables>
    <mirror-table name="clients">
      <entity name="CLIENT_LATITUDE"/>
      <entity name="CLIENT_LONGITUDE"/>
      <entity name="DEM"/>
      <sync-for-tableau-view>
        <include workbook="Analysis"/>
        <include workbook="Forecast" view="Summary"/>
      </sync-for-tableau-view>
    </mirror-table>

    <mirror-table name="interval">
      <entity name="INTERVAL_START"/>
      <entity name="INTERVAL_DURATION"/>
      <sync-for-tableau-view>
        <exclude workbook="Analysis" view="Comparison"/>
      </sync-for-tableau-view>
    </mirror-table>
  </mirror-tables>
</database-mirror>

…
  <tableau-workbook title="analysis" workbook="Analysis"
                    mirror-table-detection="manual"/>
  <tableau-workbook title="forecast" workbook="Forecast"
                    mirror-table-detection="manual"/>

…

The include and exclude elements require the workbook attribute, but the view attribute is optional. These should exactly match the names of the workbook and view. include elements are evaluated before exclude elements, regardless of order in the configuration.