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MySQL vs Tableau comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

MySQL
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
147
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (1st), Relational Databases Tools (3rd)
Tableau
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
295
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (2nd), Reporting (2nd), Data Visualization (1st), Embedded BI (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

MySQL and Tableau aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. MySQL is designed for Open Source Databases and holds a mindshare of 13.8%, down 20.7% compared to last year.
Tableau, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 19.7% mindshare, up 18.9% since last year.
Open Source Databases
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Naresh Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Lightweight and is available at a friendly price
In terms of our organization's data management strategy, especially if I talk about PLM software, which is about data management and can be regarded as the core data management of the products that we make. When we are designing something, specifically a new product, it is a critical area, especially considering that I am in the energy sector. In the energy sector, when we are building huge turbines and other things, the data might have intellectual property aspects attached to it. Even within the company, one region cannot see other regions to the extent to which the product offers security. In my company, we use PDM and PLM from Teamcenter effectively. MySQL is not a tool my company uses in production. When we create some small demos, we use MySQL. For production, we would use only Oracle because it is the most stable tool in the market. When we install Teamcenter, we don't need to touch the database. We just need to make some references to figure out this is the database, and it automatically creates everything. The basic thing about PDM and PLM systems is that the user should never touch the database because people may corrupt the data model or do anything that will have a very bad impact on the system. Database modifications only have to be made to the PLM system. We are not supposed to interact with the database directly. The tool is very lightweight, less expensive, and sometimes it is free. It is a very usable tool that is preferred by a lot of people. Only for production use, I may ask people not to use it. Integration of MySQL is like how we don't directly integrate PLM with Oracle. We have to use PLM's APIs to talk to the database. As a part of the best practices, we should not directly integrate anything with the PLM database. Feature-wise, the integration capabilities of the product are easy to use. It is like any other tool where if there is a table, there is a property. If you want to map a property using any middleware, then we can easily do that. I recommend the product to others. For medium-sized companies, MySQL is one of the best solutions. Medium-sized companies can choose not to go for Oracle, which is very expensive. In terms of the value or benefits derived by our company from the use of the product, I would say that it is not very expensive and provides performance along with scalability. The product can cater to the needs of customers ranging from 2,00,000 to 6,00,000 to 10,00,000 records. Even 20,00,000 records are fine, but after that, users may get into trouble. It is the best tool for mid-sized companies with a reasonable amount of data. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.
ROMIL SHAH - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time
When it comes to visualizations, Tableau has a limitation as compared to Power BI. It has a limited set of visualizations. Power BI has the entire marketplace, so you can connect and import many visualizations and use them, whereas Tableau has only 10 or 15 visualizations. There should be more visualizations, and there should also be data integration with more cloud providers. Tableau has recently launched a paid version for the documentation. So, documentation has become a little bit challenging when it comes to Tableau development because we do not have any tool to export the data out of it. It is a license-based feature that you need to purchase to prepare documentation. So, on the documentation front, for preparing clear documentation for any dashboard, it would help if we get an embedded option, rather than buying a license for each user for the documentation. To document anything, if I have to connect to each workbook and see what has been written as a formula and then document in the Word document, it is pretty time-consuming. We have the Microsoft stack, and we are currently evaluating Power BI because Tableau has a limitation of 50 columns for a drill-down report. If we want more than 50 columns, we have found a hack, but there is no ready-made option for doing it. So, we have to use another tool in case we need a drilled report with more than 50 columns. There are many instances where users need 80 or 90 columns for their analysis, and switching between two technologies becomes a challenge. It is not a cost-effective approach for us. Their support should be improved. We are not happy with their support. Whenever we raised queries, we were pointed to a few blogs, and we didn't get a proper solution from them. Their licensing should also be improved. They want us to purchase a Tableau Creator license for business users, whereas Power BI Desktop is free for business users. They should come up with a basic license with one or two connectors that our business users can use for preparing their visualizations. Tableau also charges us per user for users who want the data only through email.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The speed is very good."
"The product is flexible and easy to use."
"SKIP LOCKED is a valuable feature."
"The IO segregation in CGE is valuable."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The deployment process is pretty fast."
"It creates a unified view of the entire architecture and performance factor, helping to manage the network more easily."
"I like MySQL because of its community."
"The solution has great features which nobody can beat, you can do a lot of customizations, such as use different dimensions and colorize them. Additionally, you can use the numeric values for the customization, which is an exceptional feature."
"Better interaction and less time spent with end users."
"The action feature which Tableau has is very useful for us. If we click on one visualization, it will pass the value to another visualization. That interactivity within different visualizations is the most valuable feature of Tableau."
"Tableau is very flexible and easy to learn. It has drag-and-drop function analytics, and its design is very good. It is a very good tool, and it basically brings life into data with good design. We have been creating a lot of interactive visualizations and dashboards. It has a public version. There are public communities from where you can get a lot of examples for practice."
"I have found many of the self-service features valuable."
"Its performance is pretty good, and the development time is very low."
"Data handling, visualizations, and aesthetics of it are the most valuable features."
"It's very user-friendly. It's not like Power BI, Tableau is very user-friendly. Anybody can use Tableau. It's very easy to adopt things. I can visualize the stats."
 

Cons

"When I run into issues, I really have to research how to fix them."
"Oracle should start putting in some of the enterprise features in the standard feature. There are some key features that should be part of the standard."
"The replication needs improvement. It's becoming a native cloud product like Oracle DB or Cockroach DB."
"As for areas that could be improved, the tool is often used as a local database on laptops. But now, we're moving to cloud-based solutions that are more scalable and highly available. I think the tool should offer a cloud database option. This would let users keep a local copy of data if needed, but also have their data available across different regions through a cloud account."
"​MySQL needs improvements on its diagnostic features.​"
"I would like to see the automatic backup feature in the solution as well. Data is very important and we need to preserve it in a safe place. It would be good if MySQL can back up the data automatically."
"It should have some code analytical functions. It can also have a monitoring tool."
"When it comes to supporting big data, there is space to improve upon the database engines that are supported by MySQL."
"SAP BusinessObjects has some semantic layer designs that give the flexibility to do ad hoc reporting or dashboard designing. If that can be brought into Tableau, it would be great. We have the data in the database, but we should also be able to bring something between the database and the dashboard and do some semantic layer modeling for ad hoc reporting requirements."
"The architecture should be improved to better handle the data."
"It will be good if the server, could be more stable, and I would like to have the technical service to be more reliable."
"The data preparation could integrate better with Tableau."
"Firstly, the high cost of Tableau licenses makes it inaccessible for many mid-scale clients. Secondly, the server requires at least 128GB of RAM, which can be impractical for some systems. We need a dedicated system to use Tableau."
"The product needs to allow for better ways to drill down more effectively on the information at hand."
"When it comes to visualizations, Tableau has a limitation as compared to Power BI. It has a limited set of visualizations. Power BI has the entire marketplace, so you can connect and import many visualizations and use them, whereas Tableau has only 10 or 15 visualizations. There should be more visualizations, and there should also be data integration with more cloud providers."
"It should have more integration with different tools and technologies. Its licensing cost should also be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think that MySQL is a premium product."
"We've never bought a commercial license. We just use the open-source community edition."
"Microsoft licensing for SQL Server is probably ten times more expensive. I used to work for the government, and I remember when we were looking into upgrading to the enterprise version of SQL Server 2019, the licensing was going to cost 350,000. To get the equivalent in the cloud, it was going to be about four grand to get the same processing power and everything else. With MySQL, it was going to be about 300 for the same licensing. Cost-wise, for sure, there is a huge difference. Would you prefer to pay 300 a month or 3,000 to have the same amount of data resources? You might lose a few options that you need, but it isn't worth the price difference."
"We're using the open-source version right now, which is free. I do see some value in some of the more enterprise functions. We're using the open-source version right now, and I was interested in the MySQL Enterprise version really for the tools that they provide, but we decided not to make the purchase."
"We are using the free version of MySQL. We prefer paying for a yearly license."
"The pricing falls within the moderate range."
"I rate the solution's pricing as four out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive. For our basic needs, it's quite affordable. However, the cost increases when we need to scale up or require high availability. Our developer team of about 600 people uses MySQL without much issue. The pricing becomes more of a concern on the business side, as we have more end users and need constant database availability and scaling. In those cases, the solution gets a bit more expensive, even though it provides good value for the business."
"MySQL is a free and open-source solution."
"Tableau is a little cheaper as compared to Power BI and other technologies that we have used in the past. However, if the business users in our organization want to make presentations, Tableau has been asking us to purchase a Tableau Creator license, and $35 per month is expensive for business users. Power BI is giving a free desktop version for business users to connect to any data source and build their own dashboards. That's why we have proposed to use Power BI for most of the business users in our organization."
"Buy 50 at a time. Project your use base every three months, and project your requirements forward."
"I rate the product price in the Indian region a seven to eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."
"Tableau is free."
"This solution is a bit expensive. The pricing options have become more difficult over the years. I think they are bordering on pricing themselves out of the market. They need different pricing options for various-sized businesses. Where my organization is a large organization, we are happy to pay a higher price because we can leverage the products very extensively. For smaller enterprises, different pricing options would be good."
"It is reasonable and cheap as compared to other major tools. It has a good price, and people go for it because of its pricing."
"Pricing is not bad. It's competitive."
"The price is definitely a point because smaller firms don't use Tableau as it's an expensive tool."
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Comparison Review

it_user6330 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 2, 2013
MicroStrategy vs. Tableau
After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
43%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Why are MySQL connections encrypted and what is the biggest benefit of this?
MySQL encrypts connections to protect your data and the biggest benefit from this is that nobody can corrupt it. If you move information over a network without encryption, you are endangering it, m...
Considering that there is a free version of MySQL, would you invest in one of the paid editions?
I may be considered a MySQL veteran since I have been using it since before Oracle bought it and created paid versions. So back in my day, it was all free, it was open-source and the best among sim...
What is one thing you would improve with MySQL?
One thing I would improve related to MySQL is not within the product itself, but with the guides to it. Before, when it was free, everyone was on their own, seeking tutorials and how-to videos onli...
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...
Tableau vs. Business Objects - Which is a better solution for visualization and analysis?
Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it consta...
Which would you choose - Tableau or SAP Analytics Cloud?
Tableau is easy to set up and maintain. In about a day it is possible for the entire platform to be deployed for use. This relatively short amount of time can make all the difference for companies ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
 

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, Tumblr, Scholastic, MTV Networks, Wikipedia, Verizon Wireless, Sage Group, Glassfish Open Message Queue, and RightNow Technologies.
Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.
Find out what your peers are saying about Oracle, PostgreSQL, Firebird and others in Open Source Databases. Updated: December 2024.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.