I work on a team that builds Tableau dashboards for hundreds of users spread across the US. We’ve been looking at ways to improve our overall user experience, and have started investigating how many users are accessing our dashboards via desktop vs. mobile devices. Our goal was to make a data-driven decision about how much effort to put into using Tableau’s device-specific layout capabilities. That simple question lead to a small odyssey through the data that Tableau Server collects about itself. Finding the right data The first place we looked is the Tableau Server workgroups database, which contains a wealth of data about dashboard usage. In particular, the view_stats table has a device_type column that seemed to be exactly what we were looking for. SELECT device_type, SUM(nviews) FROM views_stats GROUP BY device_type Or so we thought: There’s no way we have that many tablet users This data showed surprisingly high tablet usage, which did not pass a sniff test. There’s no way we have that many tablet users!…