Establishes a live or extract connection between a MariaDB database and Tableau for interactive visualization.
Connecting lets analysts create interactive dashboards on real-time or extracted data from MariaDB without manual CSV exports.
Tableau treats MariaDB as MySQL. Install the latest MySQL ODBC or MySQL Connector/C 8.0 64-bit before launching Tableau.
1. Open Tableau → Connect > To a Server > MySQL.
2. Enter Server, Port (3306), Database, Username, and Password.
3.(Optional) Click Require SSL and add certificates.
Yes. Click Advanced > Custom SQL and paste a URI such as:mariadb://analytics:Pa$$w0rd@db.company.internal:3306/ecommerce?ssl=true&allowPublicKeyRetrieval=true
Use the Initial SQL box to set session variables:SET time_zone = '+00:00'; SELECT 1;
1. Drag Customers and Orders into the canvas.
2. Use Custom SQL (see query below).
3.Create a bar chart of SUM(lifetime_value) by name.
• Use a readonly user with limited privileges.
• Enable SSL and verify certificates.
• Prefer extracts for slow or highly concurrent databases.
• Schedule incremental refreshes to reduce load.
Wrong driver version — Use 8.0 or higher to support modern auth.
Skipping SSL — Enable SSL to avoid handshake failures on managed MariaDB hosts.
.
No. Choose the built-in MySQL connector; MariaDB uses the same protocol.
Yes. Install the same MySQL driver on every Tableau Server node and configure the refresh schedule.
Create covering indexes in MariaDB, use Initial SQL to set optimizer_switch
, or switch to extracts with incremental refresh.