---
schema_version: "1"
id: 7924e77503d301dafb61ada75b2c9d5ae54a2e86001d7f8563a974e88b9c6a1e
title: Create Custom Administrative Views
collection: tableau
version: current
locale: en-us
portal_url: https://docs.salesforce.com/tableau/current/en-us/server-linux/adminview_postgres.md
canonical_url: https://help.tableau.com/current/server-linux/en-us/adminview_postgres.htm
source_site: help.tableau.com
content_type: documentation
content_hash: 7a1a0218e5296cc99fd2b00b527c7107b9e0b43b2079c984cae2cecbb59d527f
description: Build custom administrative views by connecting Tableau Desktop to the Tableau Server repository.
---
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# Create Custom Administrative Views

In addition to the pre-built administrative views available on the Maintenance page on the Server, you can use Tableau Desktop to query and build your own analyses of server activity. To do this, you can connect to and query views in the Tableau Server repository using one of two built-in users: the "tableau" or "readonly" user.

To connect to the Tableau Server repository, see [Collect Data with the Tableau Server Repository](https://help.tableau.com/current/server-linux/en-us/perf_collect_server_repo.htm).

- The **tableau** user—The tableau user has access to special views and a subset of tables in repository database. These views and tables are provided so that administrators can create custom administrative views. Tableau makes an effort to limit changes to these tables and views so that custom views built with them do not break.
- The **readonly** user—The readonly user has access to a large number of the repository tables, providing more data about server usage. Administrators can use these to create custom administrative views too, but many of the tables are intended primarily to support the functioning of Tableau Server and may be changed or removed without warning. This means that views created from these tables can break when the database structure is changed.

For examples of custom administrative views, see the [Tableau Community](https://help.tableau.com/current/server-linux/en-us/%3Chttps://community.tableau.com/s/global-search/%40uri#q=custom admin views&t=All&f:content-type-facet=[Community]>). You can also use the temporary workbook that is generated when you view the built-in Administrative views.

Before you can connect using one of the built-in users, you must enable access to the Tableau Server database. After doing this you can use Tableau Desktop to connect to and query the database as the tableau user or the readonly user.

The `tsm configuration set` option [auditing.enabled](https://help.tableau.com/current/server-linux/en-us/cli_configuration-set_tsm.htm#auditing) controls whether Tableau Server collects historical user activity and other information in the repository. It is enabled by default. Be aware that collecting historical events impacts the size of Tableau Server's backup file (.tsbak).

- All `hist_` tables are controlled by the `tsm configuration set` option [wgserver.audit\_history\_expiration\_days](https://help.tableau.com/current/server-linux/en-us/cli_configuration-set_tsm.htm#wgserver), which controls how many days of event history are kept in the repository and has default value of 183 days.
- The `_http_requests` table is cleaned of all data older than 7 days when you run [tsm maintenance cleanup](https://help.tableau.com/current/server-linux/en-us/cli_maintenance_tsm.htm#cleanup) with the `--http-requests-table` option. For more information, see [Remove Unneeded Files](https://help.tableau.com/current/server-linux/en-us/maintenance_cleanup.htm).
- The `_background_tasks` table is cleaned automatically and keeps data for the last 30 days.
- All other tables with names that begin with a "\_" prefix contain current data.

For more information about the tables in the Tableau Server repository, see [Workgroup Database Data Dictionary](https://tableau.github.io/tableau-data-dictionary/2023.1/data_dictionary.htm) .