Recently, I did some testing with Tableau Desktop connecting to DataStax Cassandra using their newly released DataStax ODBC driver. Before the release of the DataStax ODBC driver, the only way to connect Tableau Desktop to DataStax was the DataStax Enterprise Connector (a.k.a. Hive Thrift Server).

While Hive is a great analytic tool, it is somewhat slow. When you are trying to load data for a report, which should be relatively quick, Hive can take a little time to get up to speed. I’m sure everyone that has used Hive knows what I’m talking about.

I would highly recommend downloading and installing the DataStax ODBC driver.

There is a nice little how-to on the DataStax blog @ http://www.datastax.com/download-drivers.