“Sigma is the enterprise leader in self-service analytics and business intelligence”
The data landscape is changing, and your Business Intelligence (BI) tool needs to keep pace. As companies rapidly shift to Cloud Data Warehouses (CDWs) like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery, traditional BI platforms like Tableau are struggling to keep up.
For years, Tableau has been the standard for beautiful, pixel-perfect visualizations. But that power often comes at the cost of speed, accessibility, and real-time access to your data. If your data strategy is cloud-first, it’s time to move to an analytics platform built for the cloud: Sigma Computing.
The Cloud Data Warehouse is the Future (and Sigma is Built for It)
The demand for CDWs is increasing every day. Businesses choose the cloud for speed, scale, and security. These warehouses are designed to handle petabytes of data, offer elastic scaling, and provide robust security features and governance.
However, traditional BI tools create an expensive, ungoverned bottleneck.
The Tableau Bottleneck
With Tableau, you often end up:
- Exporting data out of your CDW into Excel which beats the purpose of setting up security measures in your data warehouse.
- Aggregating data and losing granular insights you paid the CDW to keep.
- Managing 100’s of extracts on different schedules, leading to version control hiccups and stale data.
- Rebuilding security & governance within Tableau instead of leveraging your CDW’s native controls.
| Note: A Tableau Cloud migration still involves managing extracts and dealing with resource/storage limits, underscoring its historical architecture. |
With Sigma: Maximize Your CDW Investment
Sigma is cloud-native, connecting directly from your browser to your CDW to query live data. This architecture ensures:
- No Extracts: You never export or move data out of your CDW, eliminating the version control problem and ensuring your analysis is always real-time.
- Massive Scale: Sigma leverages the computing power and governance of your CDW, allowing business users to analyze billions of rows instantly.
- Unified Governance: Security, access controls, and data models defined in your CDW are automatically inherited by Sigma.
Why Sigma Can Be A Game Changer For Your Business
Spreadsheet-like Interface
The primary reason to switch is to empower your entire organization—not just your BI team—to work with data.
Sigma takes the familiar rows, columns, and formulas of a spreadsheet and applies them to your massive cloud datasets. This radically lowers the barrier to entry, turning analysts, marketing professionals, and finance users into power data explorers who can drill down, slice or dice the data in any way to answer data questions in seconds which would take days or even weeks before with the traditional BI tools and workflows.
Live, Granular Data
Ad hoc analysis is only valuable if it’s on the most current and detailed data. By avoiding extracts, Sigma guarantees that every spontaneous query is running live against the CDW, ensuring the answers are based on the latest business truth. Users can drill down into the absolute lowest level of detail across billions of rows without extracts or pre-aggregation.
Native-Writeback Functionality
A game-changer for finance, operations, and planning. Sigma allows teams to add context to the data by writing data back to the warehouse (e.g., for forecasting, budget adjustments, or scorecards) without overwriting the original data—a feature Tableau simply does not support.
Sigma Data Apps
Sigma’s innovative solution to modern workflows – Data Apps are a low-code/no-code solution built directly on the CDW. They move beyond passive dashboards to create interactive, workflow-based applications accessible to non-technical business users.
Teams can build complex P&L statements, budget models, and operational scorecards using a spreadsheet interface, leveraging live data and the Writeback feature for immediate adjustments.
Easy Version Control
Unlike Tableau’s need to maintain separate copies or manage revisions across workbooks, Sigma allows you to apply tags to versions and offers a Full, Infinite Version History. You can also set permissions on tagged versions.
Stop Managing Extracts. Start Analyzing.
The future of BI is cloud-native, real-time, and accessible to everyone. The time spent manually migrating workbooks, extracts, and data sources in a complex process—even just to go from Tableau Server to Tableau Cloud—can be better spent leveraging the power of a modern platform. Stop managing the complexity of extracts and stale data. Choose the platform built to scale with your modern Cloud Data Warehouse. Choose Sigma Computing.