Best practice for R installed in parallel with tableau 10.5

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Apologies if this is too far off topic. Please let me know if I should close/delete/move this question.

Our data team uses R as a primary tool. Unfortunately we also have a fair volume of support we have to give to existing (and maintaining/extending) Tableau. This question is about having both installed on the same system.

Our team uses Mac books, with High Sierra. One of us has recently updated their tableau installation to tableau 10.5. We currently believe that this overwrites and breaks the existing Amazon Redshift odbc connections that have been set up according to RStudios extremely helpful best practices website.

It breaks the existing connection architecture in the following ways:

  1. It changes the installation of the driver from opt/amazon/redshift/lib/ which is the default from the Amazon published .pkg installer, to opt/amazon/redshift/lib/universal
  2. It needs the character encoding to be set to UTF = 32, not the UTF = 16 that we have used as per this github issue.
  3. It breaks knitr .pdf generation with an error when the report is rendered, but not when the code is run interactively. I am still looking into this one.

My question is: Is there anyone else running support/admin who has found this? (Beware if you are about to upgrade!). Additionally is there any one who has any advice for running the two systems in parallel? I'm wondering if I can get the odbc connection manager to support two separate DSN connections, one for each service. Does that sound like a reasonable solution? Is there something more suitable? I have an open question in Tableaus support community here.

P.S. My first suggestion was drop tableau. Apparently that isn't an option ;p.

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Hi @DaveRGP, would just adding multiple DSNs in the odbcinst.ini file be a viable solution? Each one would specify a different encoding.

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Probably. Glad you think that's a viable solution :slight_smile: . It seemed reasonable, but seeing as it's a bit new to me, I had a crisis of faith :stuck_out_tongue: .