title: Connecting open-source Cassandra to Tableau Desktop
body: <p>I am trying to use the Business Intelligence (BI) software Tableau Desktop to see into a local Cassandra cluster. The Cassandra cluster is the open-source version and not the proprietary version that one pays to use. The version of Cassandra I am using is 2.2.x. </p>
  
  <p>I can successfully connect Cassandra and Tableau after configuring the 64 bit ODBC driver. However, actually querying the tables in the NoSQL database throws errors. For instance in the 'Data Source' view selecting 'Update Now' results in an error from a SQL statement that starts with SELECT 1... I do not think Cassandra can understand, process, SELECT 1 statements. </p>
  
  <p>Errors are also thrown when trying to build graphs of the data as this also results in failed queries. </p>
  
  <p>In the 'Advanced Options' for the ODBC driver I selected to use CQL as the 'Query Mode' and still there were problems with the queries Tableau was sending to Cassandra. </p>
  
  <p><strong>Does anyone know how to get these two technologies to work together?</strong> I found this tutorial but it was made almost a year ago, as of this writing, and does not work from my experience. Please see the link to what I am talking about here: <a href="http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/datastax-odbc-cql-connector-apache-cassandra-datastax-enterprise" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/datastax-odbc-cql-connector-apache-cassandra-datastax-enterprise</a> In this article they say to download the driver from here: <a href="https://academy.datastax.com/downloads/download-drivers?dxt=DX" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://academy.datastax.com/downloads/download-drivers?dxt=DX</a> I am wondering this specific version of the ODBC driver is the problem. </p>
  
  <p>I also read a previous post on this and it was not helpful as it is also obsolete from my experience. The post I am referring to is at the following URL: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27523928/connecting-cassandra-to-tableau-software">Connecting cassandra to Tableau Software</a> The first answer is probably the obsolete one but the second one recommends to use the Simba driver, which is some type of proprietary driver. My current hypotheses is maybe the Simba driver is needed to use Tableau and Cassandra together.</p>
  
  <p>Thank-you for reading this.</p>