Tracking Tableau Viewership with PostgreSQL

Jung Kim — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 19:36:23 +0000

Tracking Tableau Viewership with PostgreSQL

Tableau's native "Who has seen this view?" panel is a flat list — no trends, no way to tell if usage is real or just the publisher checking their own work. With direct access to the Tableau PostgreSQL repository, you can do a lot better: turn raw access events into aggregated viewership data your dashboard creators can actually act on. Here's the query I use to power that.

The SQL

WITH access_events AS (
    -- Pull only "Access View" events from the last 90 days
    SELECT
        he.id,
        he.created_at,
        he.hist_view_id,
        he.hist_workbook_id,
        he.hist_actor_user_id
    FROM historical_events he
    JOIN historical_event_types het
        ON he.historical_event_type_id = het.type_id   -- filter to the event type we care about
    WHERE het.name = 'Access View'
      AND he.created_at >= NOW() - INTERVAL '90 days'
)
SELECT
    w.name                           AS workbook_name,      -- current workbook name, from the live content table
    hu.friendly_name                 AS viewer_name,         -- NULL when the workbook has zero views
    COUNT(ae.id)                     AS view_count,          -- 0 when no matching access events
    MAX(ae.created_at)               AS last_viewed          -- NULL when never viewed
FROM _workbooks w                                            -- drive from the full content table...
LEFT JOIN hist_workbooks hw ON hw.workbook_id     = w.id      -- ...so workbooks with no history still show up
LEFT JOIN access_events ae  ON ae.hist_workbook_id = hw.id
LEFT JOIN hist_users hu     ON hu.id               = ae.hist_actor_user_id
GROUP BY w.name, hu.friendly_name
ORDER BY w.name, view_count DESC;

The use case

I built this as the backbone of a self-service "Viewership Analytics" dashboard — KPI tiles, a time-series trend, top-viewers ranking, and a detail table with recency color-coding. The goal was to give dashboard creators direct visibility into how their own content is actually being used, so they can answer "is anyone using this?" on their own, anytime. Driving the query from the full workbook list also means unviewed content shows up right alongside everything else, instead of needing a second query to catch what never got seen.

Things to know before you use this

hist_workbooks.id is just the internal ID for that snapshot row, not the workbook itself. If you need a stable way to track a specific workbook over time, use hist_workbooks.workbook_id instead. This matters more than it sounds like it should: workbook names and even publishing locations can change during development — especially before a workbook lands in its final, published-to-prod state — so tracking by internal snapshot ID or by name alone can silently split what should be one workbook's history into several.
friendly_name availability can vary. It's present on hist_users in this table, but in other parts of the repository it only lives on system_users — worth confirming which table has it populated in your version before you build on top of this.
Self-views aren't excluded here on purpose. As written, this counts a publisher viewing their own workbook the same as anyone else. Depending on your use case that might be exactly what you want (e.g., an admin dashboard), or it might inflate "most viewed" rankings if you're handing this to creators. If you want to exclude them, add a join to the workbook's owner and filter hist_actor_user_id != owner_id.

DEV Community: Jung Kim

Tracking Tableau Viewership with PostgreSQL

Tracking Tableau Viewership with PostgreSQL

The SQL

The use case

Things to know before you use this