When necessary to produce a Tableau viz, a Tableau data extract is a compressed snapshot of data that is stored on disc and imported into memory. For a working definition, that is acceptable. The complete narrative is, however, considerably more compelling and engaging.

TDE designs are excellent for facilitating analytics and data discovery due to two factors. A TDE is a columnar store, which is the initial point. I won’t go into great depth on columnar stores because excellent documents like this one already do it.