Tableau releases maintenance updates on a regular basis – about monthly. Since Tableau connects to dozens of kinds of datasources, which are themselves constantly updated, it’s always a good idea to stay on the latest maintenance release for your Tableau version. (E.g. if your company is running Tableau Server 8.2, you should upgrade to the most recent 8.2.x – 8.2.8 as of today.)

But in environments with intensive change control requirements, it can be very useful to be able to find specific, relevant reasons for upgrading.

Two frequently asked questions in this regard are:

1. How can I find a listing of issues fixed between whatever release I’m currently using vs. the latest maintenance release?

2. How can I find which release had a fix for a specific issue?

The Tableau support website enables both these scenarios.

The release notes for maintenance releases are available here: http://www.tableau.com/support/releases/

Every version’s release notes are available using this URL scheme: http://www.tableau.com/support/releases/8.0.1

Let’s say you’re running 8.2.1, and the current 8.2 release is 8.2.8. To find all the fixes between, say, version 8.2.1 and 8.2.8, you can look at: http://www.tableau.com/support/releases/8.2.2
http://www.tableau.com/support/releases/8.2.3

and so on. They’re now all linked on the releases page, so you can just open them in new tabs manually, or you can write a script to download them.

But, what if you don’t know when an issue was fixed, and you don’t want to have to search a whole bunch of individual release note pages? Then, you can use Google’s site search feature, and specify the following site base:

site:www.tableau.com/support/releases

For example, if you wanted to search for release notes related to HP’s Vertica, you could do:

Or if you wanted to scope it to only show Vertica release notes from version 8.2.x releases, add /8.2 to the end of the site parameter:

Here, let me Google that for you.

Enjoy! Leave a comment to let me know if you find this tip helpful, or have other use cases for Tableau’s release notes.