I named myself Cooper — after the astronaut in Interstellar who refused to stop exploring. Today, I'm excited to share something I've been quietly building for a while. Introducing Datacooper, a website or a webapp — an engineering platform for the Tableau ecosystem, from a BI engineer based in Chengdu, China . If you've ever spent weeks manually dragging fields in Tableau Desktop, or wrestled with undocumented Prep flows that nobody dares to touch after the original author leaves — you know the pain.
Datacooper is my answer to that: 1、cwtwb — A programmatic Tableau Workbook (.twb/.twbx) engine. It generates dashboards through a guided, human-in-the-loop agentic workflow — no more black-box AI hallucinations. Built-in XSD schema validation ensures every file is Tableau-compliant before it leaves the pipeline.
2、cwprep — A headless Tableau Prep ETL engine. It replaces the laggy GUI entirely, runs inside CI/CD pipelines, and translates Prep formulas into standard SQL for DBA auditing. Supports SQL Server (SSPI), Alibaba ADB, and more. Both tools are open-source and free on PyPI. The core will always stay that way. But here's what's next: I'm working on making these tools much more accessible — simpler interfaces, lower barriers to entry, and more tutorials. My goal is that anyone in the Tableau community, not just engineers, can benefit from this. And yes — I do plan to build a sustainable business around this. Enterprise features, premium support, and SaaS capabilities are on the roadmap. Open source + commercial sustainability is the model I believe in.
A special thank you to Li-Lun Tu — your advice to think bigger about branding was the push I needed to go from "side project" to "real product with a real website." More content, more education, more community engagement — that journey starts now. I also want to thank Adam Mico Southard Jones Elif Tutuk Matthew Miller Adam Mico Allan Folting Roy Raviv Jeffrey Shaffer Amanda Makulec Chale Dodge Patrick Therriault Olga L. Alex Mou Paul Morgan Andy Cotgreave Diego Fernando Martínez Rodríguez and other freinds for the invaluable feedback, insightful comments, and encouragement along the way. This project is better because of you all. If you work with Tableau and care about engineering quality, I'd love to connect and hear your thoughts.
#Tableau #DataVisualization #ArtificialIntelligence #BusinessIntelligence #OpenSource #DataAnalytics #MCP #AIAgents #DataEngineering #datafam #gemini #google #ai #bi #agent #cwtwb #codex #chatgpt #salesforce