In the earlier recipes, we saw how to join data from multiple data tables that are either within a single database or across multiple databases. The cross-database join functionality was introduced by Tableau in version 10.0 and, in versions prior to this, one could rely on the Data Blending functionality to get data from multiple data sources.
Even though the cross-database Join has made joining the data from disparate data sources fairly easy, the Data Blending functionality still exists and can be used where cross-database Joins won't work. For example, cross-database functionality can't be used with Salesforce or Google Analytics or even multi-dimensional cubes. One can also use Data Blending over cross-database Joins when the data is at a different granularity.
Let us explore this functionality in more details in the following recipe.
For this recipe, we will download the sample data that has been uploaded on the following link:
