Yesterday I’ve had a great meeting with Alican Polat. Alican has got roughly 20 years of experience in the analytics industry!!! The spectrum he covers in this area reaches from architectural design, over SAP, Tableau and other BI front end as well as backend tools, too machine learning algorithms!
Today I’d love to quickly share an architectural design he came up with throughout this year. As a machine-learning enthusiast, he likes to code R and Python code at the same time. “Depending on the use case there are libraries out there which sometimes are faster in R and other times in Python” he says.
Based on Tableau’s documentation one could think that you can just use a single External Service like Python and R. The truth is, you can leverage both at the same time if you’re leveraging Alican’s architecture:
He set up TabPy to communicate with Tableau Server. TabPy is routing every R and Python function to Flask, which simply acts as a proxy. Based on a rules (e.g. naming conventions) Flask decides where to route the request to either R or Python before the result set does get send back to Tableau Server.
Side note:
- Matlab is not used in their current environment and would be interesting to see if Flask could route requests to Matlab, too
- Julia (=”high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for numerical computing”) could might be added to this architecture like Alexander Loth describes in his blog post
If you like this approach please leave a comment below and Alican Polat or myself will make a follow up post with more details about it.
Leave a Reply