Tableau Data Modeling Explained: Relationships, Joins, and Data Prep Best Practices

This webinar took a practical deep dive into how Tableau handles data modeling—and why mastering it can drastically improve the accuracy, usability, and performance of your dashboards. We demystified how Tableau’s logical and physical data layers work, when to use joins vs. relationships, how unions behave, and what happens behind the scenes when Tableau writes queries. Attendees also saw how tools like Tableau Prep and custom SQL fit into the broader data modeling process.

During this webinar, attendees:

• Understand Tableau’s Logical and Physical Layers: Learn what happens when you define joins, relationships, and unions—and how Tableau distinguishes between the two model layers
• Explore Real-World Modeling Techniques: See examples of how to prepare data using Tableau Prep, when to use custom SQL, and how to model data efficiently for analytical flexibility
• Avoid Common Pitfalls: Discover mistakes that lead to performance issues or wrong aggregations and how to build models that scale across multiple dashboards
• Improve Dashboard Performance Through Better Modeling: Learn how thoughtful design at the data layer can reduce load times, prevent LOD complexity, and improve extract performance