How do I conduct scalability testing with TabJolt

Before you setup a Tableau Server, you have a lot of questions

• Do I have enough servers for my users?
• How will my user mix (viewer/interactor) impact my server capacity planning?
• How many VizQLs do I need for my user community?
• Can I configure 8 VizQL instances on a single server?
• …… to name a few.

The idea behind this post is to guide you on how to do some of your own tests to get some of the answers

So, lets get started and understand a few things about scalability tests

The idea is to understand how many users of a particular type of load can a server support

Now, since I currently work for Tableau and have had exposure to some of their tools, I used one of their tools (TabJolt) to conduct some of the tests

The rest of the article follows an approach. You can most certainly follow the same approach and use a completely different tool

Getting Started with TabJolt 

I don’t plan to re-invent the wheel so if you haven’t even started with TabJolt, please refer to this great blog on TabJolt

How do I start?

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4th Data Revolution

After invention of writing (4000 B.C.), then movable type (in tenth century), mass printing in the eighteenth century and now the information age.

Isn’t it cool that we are part of one of the biggest transformation of our interactions with each other?

How GreenButton helped me save 35% on my utilities bill

I love data, I do.
And if you give me some data, I am going to try to utilize it somehow.

Recently, I was driven to act upon our energy consumption habits when I started to see our family utilities bill climb up every single month. I will be honest, I didn’t care until our bill was less than 100$ month, but climbing up every month couldn’t be right. PGE couldn’t be raising my rates every day, could they?

So I did some fact finding and figures that it was all my fault (and my family’s)

So, now did I reduce my bill? Here are a simple few steps that might help you too (hopefully they do)

Data vs. Information

At an interview recently, I was asked “What is the difference between data and information?”.

Funny tihng is that I was reading an article on the same topic the day before and that had made me think how do I differentiate data and information.

My response to my interviewer was “To me, data becomes Information once you put some context to it“. My interviewer said “I like that” but then he also mentioned that he has heard another flavor that says “Data is RAW and Information is Processed“. I felt that maybe he didn’t like my response as much and he likes the other flavor better.

so, that makes me think this again. Is Data truly Raw and becomes information only once it has been processed?

I agree that can process the data to get information out of it, but isn’t sometimes data just enough to be utilized as Information?

also, isn’t putting context to data, in a way, processing the data?

Well, I do stand by what I said because it is after all an opinion not a theorem.