Cloudera and Tableau Software today announced the general availability of a new Hadoop connector that enables Tableau users to pull data directly from Hive into the data visualization platform.

Originally released in beta last November, Cloudera Connector for Tableau comes integrated with the latest version of the Tableau platform, Tableau 7.0, which was released last month. According to a blog post by Cloudera’s Director of Products Basier Aziz, the new connector can be installed in three steps:

1. Download and run the Cloudera Connector for Tableau executable.
2. Point the Windows ODBC Data Source Administrator to the Cloudera ODBC Driver for Apache Hive.
3. Identify the Hive data source in Tableau Desktop.

Dan Jewitt, Tableau’s Vice President of Product Management, said the new connector hides the complexity associated with Hadoop and allows Tableau users to focus on exploring, rather then configuring, Big Data.

Image courtesy of Cloudera

The Cloudera-Tableau connector is part of a broader trend to deliver easy-to-use data visualization capabilities to Hadoop. Competing business intelligence vendor Microstrategy has also partnered with Cloudera on its own Hadoop data connector, while start-up Datameer offers a native, Hadoop-based business intelligence and visualization platform.