Microsoft created an online platform called Windows Azure Marketplace for trading Software as a Service applications and data. Users can choose to buy and sell various datasets, and that makes it a great place to use datasets hosted on the cloud with Tableau.
To access the Azure Marketplace datasets, you'll need to create or already have an account with Microsoft (which was earlier called Windows Live ID). Once you are logged in with your Live ID, you'll also need to complete the registration process.
Once you have completed the registration process for the Azure Marketplace, perform the following steps to get the data from the Marketplace to Tableau:
- Log in to Windows Azure Marketplace (datamarket.azure.com) with your account credentials.
- Click on Data on the top navigation menu.
- Click on the US Air Carrier Flight Delays dataset.
- Click on Sign-up to subscribe to the dataset, and perform all the required steps.
- Once the subscription process is complete, click on the Explore this Dataset link.
- In the Build Query area, select On_Time_Performance from the Query field and hit Run Query.
- You should see a URL for the currently expressed query, which would look something like https://api.datamarket.azure.com/Data.ashx/oakleaf/US_Air_Carrier_Flight_Delays_Incr/v1/On_Time_Performance?$top=100.
- Copy this URL.
- In Tableau, go to the Connect to Data options screen.
- Click on Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket.
- In the OData Connection pop-up box, shown in the following image, under the Step 1 input box, enter the copied URL:
- In Step 2 of this process, either select the Account key or Username option and enter the credentials (you'll find the Account key value below the OData URL information; you need to click on Show to make the key visible).
- In Step 3, click on the Connect button. If you do not see any message, you will be able to connect to the data file.
- In Step 4, enter a name for the connection and hit OK.
Microsoft Azure Marketplace offers a data market for users to explore datasets, which are usually scattered everywhere on the Web. This marketplace creates a central repository of datasets, and with Tableau's integration of this marketplace, it is very easy to analyze various datasets.
Microsoft's online support provides detailed information for users, who could be consumers or publishers of the data, as well as developers of Azure applications and services. You can read it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg315539.aspx.