How to Overwrite or Delete Only Certain Records Instead of Full or Incremental Refresh When Outputting in Tableau Prep

Published: 07 Sep 2022
Last Modified Date: 09 Dec 2022

Question

How to overwrite or delete only certain records instead of full or incremental refresh when outputting in Tableau Prep?

Is there any way to refresh only certain records by some key column? For example, delete the record when [ID]=5, or set the [Sales]=100 when [ID]=5.
For now, Tableau Prep only has Full Refresh or Incremental Refresh options shown in the image below:

User-added image

Environment

Tableau Prep Builder

Answer

The ability to overwrite or delete only certain records when performing an output step, is not currently built into Tableau Prep Builder.

Workaround

Add a Clean Step to modify the data as needed before the Output Step in the flow file.

- Overwrite: create a calculation field and modify specific records.
- Delete: add a filter.

When publishing data sources to Tableau Cloud / Tableau Server, you can also use the Edit Data Source function to overwrite or delete only certain records after publishing.