Many Linux services have a concept of reloading. If the config file changes you can send the running program a signal and it will re read the config. This is very useful for production systems.

Tableau (9 at least) has no such concept.

Change the email address it reports to? Restart tableau.

Change the location of the SSL certificates? Restart tableau.

Want to apply an update for tableau? Uninstall your current version and install the new one. Oh and until recently when you downloaded the installer for tableau server the file name didn't actually contain the version number.

This product was not designed with ops in mind at all.

Edit: I forgot, I've actually had a tableau server fill itself up with logs. Tableau has logs in many different locations outside of windows event viewer and doesn't include log rotation facilities for all if them.

It's like that because R&D and Operations never talk; and of course your average Windows Ops person has a poor understanding of operating systems.

Never understood why Tableau is either Windows only or has the restart to reconfig issue. Last I looked, it was largely a Tomcat and PostgreSQL based product.

Just trying to understand since I've written software with the same restart to config workflow and would like to understand what causes it to be problematic.

If reloading was an option then there wouldn't be downtime, and I wouldn't need to schedule a maintenance window for something as simple as updating an email address. The idea being that if there is a config error during a reload, the system just continues uninterrupted with the original config. If I have to stop the system completely in order to run the config sanity checks when it starts again, the potential for prolonged downtime is much greater.

Would a system that did something like an internal cut-over be useful? e.g. try to start a whole new instance of the application, if it loads, then let it become the running application, if not, write an error log and shutdown?

It would still lose all the state associated with the previous instance, e.g. user sessions, but would avoid this specific issue.

I agree that it's pretty silly that things like email addresses need a restart, but I'm wondering in general how bad this pattern is.

An interrupted session isn't a big deal if it's an infrequent occurrence and they can just login again.

I think an improved solution in this vein would be a tool that would let you sanity check the config before reloading.

But yeah, this thing is a mess.

did you ever consider there might be valid reasons some folks prefer *nix based servers?

Check the timestamps of those messages vs mine. At the time there were only the two responses I mentioned.

Deploying visualizations without having to develop any HTML or JavaScript code.

Publishing to the desktop (Windows or Mac), to the web, to the cloud, or mobile devices (iOS and Android). Publish to the server once, consume on all supported platforms.

Deploying a copy of a current site for redundancy, testing or development. Install the app, backup the primary Tableau database with its admin utility (command line), restore it on the new box. All data, visualizations, users and permissions are contained in that single restore step.

Tableau means I spend time working with my data, instead of the presentation of it. Its not a perfect product by any measure, and could obviously use some improvements, but is a timesaver in many areas.