SpotFire for Data Analytics
I recently completed a rollout for a major energy company using SpotFire for data analytics from multiple data sources. This is just a quick review of initial impressions. My career in the corporate tower was short, but out of it came some great experience with a new tool in my data toolbox. You can download a free trial here: http://spotfire.tibco.com/
Pro’s:
- Development environment is very easy to learn
- Learning portal has lots of great videos to get you started
- Great choices of visualizations
- Marking – this is a great feature to allow web users to dynamically select and analyze data on the fly.
- Caching large amounts of data for responsive analysis
Con’s:
- Data connection properties are not intuitive. If you make your connection wrong, you loose some functionality.
- Joining or unioning multiple data sources is tricky. I will have more on this in an upcoming article using multiple data sources.
- Scripting is required to extend the capabilities of any of the standard visualizations.
- I spent a lot of time getting data into just the right format to get a desired visualization.
- Does not play well with SSAS cube hierarchies.
Overall, this is a great addition that fits the middle ground above SSRS reporting and pure dashboarding tools.