Last month we launched author profiles and we celebrated all the talented people who use Tableau Public to share interactive visualizations on the web. Visualizations don’t happen without authors, at least not yet, and arguably not ever.

But data visualizations also don’t happen without data, so this month we’re celebrating what has become the new oil, the new soil, whichever you prefer – it’s the raw material that’s fueling the information revolution underway on this planet.

Here at Tableau, we love data, so we're declaring August "Data Month".

A Million Rows, A Million Reasons

And what a way to start it off - you now can use Tableau Public to connect to data sets with up to 1 million rows of data. Yep, that’s a tenfold increase over the previous limit of 100,000 rows of data. Consider it a gift from us to you. We can’t wait to see what you do with it.

Oh, and we’ve also increased your storage space from 50MB to 1GB to go along with it. We figured you'd need some extra room. It's already there, just login using your account information, and take a look at the box in the bottom left. Here's what mine says:

You can see that I was getting close to the old 50MB limit, but now there's plenty of headroom. If you’re as excited as I am, tweet us a message using the hashtag #AMillionRows”. Tell us what you plan to do with all that new horsepower, include a link to a data set you plan to visualize first, or just tell us how awesome you think it is that we just super-sized Tableau Public for you. We’ll choose three tweets at random next Friday and send a special gift.

Go ahead, give it a spin

If you'd like to try it out for yourself, here are some sample data sets to download, connect to and visualize:

2012 UK Road Safety data (145K accidents) - data | website

2011 U.S. Medicare inpatient charge data (170K rows) - data | website

2011 NYPD “Stop-and-Frisk” data (685K incidents) - data | website

What else do we have in store for “Data Month”?

In celebration of “Data Month”, the Tableau Public team has a great line-up of useful blog post for you around the subject of data. Keep an eye on this blog as we go in-depth on the following subjects:

Online data sources Data scraping Data shaping Best practices for 1M rows

We'll publish a few "vizzes" in the coming weeks that put the new data limit to the test, and you can bet our Viz of the Day page will include some great examples from the community of authors, too.

As always, thanks for stopping by,

Ben