A New Chapter: Moving to blog.fluckiger.org

After 20 years on Blogger, I'm moving to a new home: blog.fluckiger.org.

It's bittersweet. This blog has been a great place to learn in the open, and I'm grateful for the platform that made it so easy to share ideas over the years. It's hard to believe it's been two decades.

But it was long overdue for an update. The new site is built on Astro, powered by Markdown, and hosted on Cloudflare. It's a much more modern setup, and I'm excited about the fresh start.

I hope you'll follow me on the journey there. Cheers to more Cranking out Good Code. See you at blog.fluckiger.org

— Joseph

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Unleashing Tableau’s Semantic Layer with AI Agents

⚡ TL;DR I helped built a tool that lets you query Tableau’s semantic layer using natural language and AI. By integrating a LangChain agent with Tableau’s VizQL Data Service (VDS), we can repurpose Tableau’s trusted data model for conversational analytics . This means you can ask questions in plain English and get answers backed by the same definitions and security that your Tableau dashboards use. In this post, I’ll introduce this open-source agentic tool ( tableau_langchain ), why it’s transformative for analytics, and how it works under the hood. Why Connect LangChain Agents to Tableau? As a user of Tableau, I’ve seen how powerful Tableau’s semantic layer is. It encapsulates our organization’s business logic: things like predefined metrics, calculations, data relationships, and even row-level security rules. Traditionally, that semantic layer is only accessible through Tableau’s interface – you drag and drop fields to build a viz, and Tableau generates the query for you. Rece...

RAM Disks do not speed up Visual Studio

The limiting factor for Visual Studio is disk IO. I got a tip to speed up Visual Studio from Channel 9 by creating a RAM disk which sounded like a great idea. However, when I ran a thorough set of tests, I found that the performance difference between the Ram disk and the hard disk were not appreciably different. This was a big surprise since RAM is 240,000 times faster than disk (see my previous blog post). But the reason is because Visual Studio and Vista do a lot of caching. So compile times for the same project in RAM disk and on hard disk were pretty similar. I also tested the time it took to search the entire solution for a word, and times to open a solution. There was no discernable difference! If you still want to try it out and create your own RAM disk, you can download a simple RAMDISK.EXE utility to create a RAM disk in just a few minutes. What is a RAM Disk ? Ramdisk is a virtual drive created in RAM. Performance Analysis Creating f...

How to Create and Run Tableau Bridge on Linux Containers

Tableau Bridge is now availble on Linux Containers. Yay! Now what does this mean and how do I build and run Linux Containers? We will discuss the advantages of running Bridge on Linux Containers the steps to build them, and finally, we will provide some automation script ideas for monitoring and scaling Linux Bridge agents. Tableau Bridge Today Until recently, Tableau Bridge was only available as a Windows application running on a Windows VM. It supported only one bridge agent per Virtual or Physical Machine. Advantages of Bridge in Containers Better Hardware Utilization: Linux containers are more efficient than Windows VMs, requiring only about 1/50th of the disk space. Ability to Spin Up Multiple Bridge Agents: With Linux Containers, it becomes easier to spin up multiple bridge agents on a single machine, improving scalability and resource utilization. Infrastructure Automation: Linux Containers enable easier automation of provisioning bridge agents and upgrading Tableau Bridge, the...

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