Before you can build a view and analyze your data, you must first connect Tableau to your data. Tableau supports connecting to a wide variety of data, stored in a variety of places.

By default, when you connect a data source to Tableau, Tableau will create a live connection to the data.

Live connection refers to a data source that contains direct connection to underlying data, which provides real-time or near real-time data. With a live connection, Tableau makes queries directly against the database or other source, and returns the results of the query for use in a workbook. Users can create live connections and then share them on Tableau Server so that other Tableau users can use the same data using the same connection and filtering settings.