Microsoft SQL server connectivity issue with tableau server

Question

I'm having trouble connecting the data sources from SSMS to Tableau server. I can connect the SQL server to Tableau Desktop, but when I try to connect the data sources published to the tableau server from the SQL server, I get the errors below. This is not allowing the refresh of the Tableau reports.

Answer 1

Hi @Mayra Arango ，

It may be more about not having enough permissions
Please make sure the user you used is added as database server user, this user can connect by SSMS directly, please change the run as user account to a domain account that as access to the SQL Server database, and you can try to change the data connection so that it uses SQL authentication and embedded password, if the Run As user is a local machine account and it does not have access to the SQL Server database

Please check out this doc:
https://kb.tableau.com/articles/issue/sql-extract-refresh-fails-with-login-failed-for-user

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/sql/connect/login-failed-for-user#login-failed-for-user-username-or-login-failed-for-user-domainusername

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Answer 2

First, I know nothing about Tableau. (And Tableau is far as I know not a Microsoft product.)

But the error message says that access fails for DOMAIN\MACHINE$. Note the dollar at the end. This means that the access is by the machine account. This happens when you are logged in with a local account and try to connect to SQL Server running on a different machine with Windows authentication.

In this particular case, you are not logged in yourself, but apparently the login comes from the Tableau server which has been set up run with a local account like NT Service\Tableau$Service of NetworkService or similar.

You could solve this by granting access to the machine account (the one in the error message), but it is not really fantastic for security. It may be better to create a domain account for Tableau and use that as the service account for Tableau.