Tableau is a data visualization tool that makes visualizing your data effortless. Visualizations makes you understand data better and share perception to enhance your business. When it comes to refreshing your dataset, it totally depends on the type of connection you have used to connect that dataset. There are two primary connections in Tableau –

Live Data Source
Extract

Live Data Source:

By default, a live data connection is created when you connect to a data in Tableau irrespective of the source whether it’s a file stored locally on your computer or in a cloud database. Every transform in Tableau Desktop will create a new query to be sent to the data source.

Refreshing with a Live Data Source your visualizations will be updated every time you open your workbook or if you manually refresh the data source. To refresh your data manually-

Step 1: Right click on the name of your workbook displayed on the upper left of the screen.

Step 2: Click on Refresh as shown below.

Extract:

When you toggle your data connection from “Live” to “Extract”, a static snapshot of the data is taken. The extract is embedded in the workbook and available offline. This means any queries sent to the data source can happen much faster.

Refreshing with an extract involves following steps:

Step 1: Right click on the name of your workbook displayed on the upper left of the screen.

Step 2: Clicking on Refresh will not update the data in your workbook if any changes are made in your original data. It is same as Live Connection.

Step 3: Clicking on Extract and then Refresh will create a new extract also known as the new snapshot of the original data and therefore it will update the data in your workbook.

You can automate the process of refreshing your data extract by Publishing your data source to Tableau Server and scheduling when and how often you want your extract to refresh.

There are two types of refreshes in Extract connection:

Full Refresh
Incremental Refresh

Full Refresh:

By default, extracts are fully refreshed. Full Refresh means that every time you refresh the extract, all the rows are replaced with the data in the underlying data source. This ensures that you have an exact copy of the underlying data source.
Full Refresh thus can be expensive and takes long time depending on how big the extract is.
Full Refresh can be applied with the following steps.

Right click on workbook –> Extract –> Refresh –> Below window will Pop-up –> Select All Rows –> Extract.

Incremental Refresh:

Instead of refreshing the entire extract, set it up to only add the rows that are new since the last time of the extracted data.
Incremental refresh is much faster than since it is not querying data already present in the extract.
Incremental Refresh can be applied with the following steps.

Right click on workbook –> Extract –> Refresh –> Below window will Pop-up –> Check Incremental Refresh –> Identify Column –> Extract.

 

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