Discover, Analyze, Explore, Pivot, Drilldown, Visualize your data… “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” [E.M. Forster, G. Wallas, A. Gide]
Today TIBCO announced Spotfire 5, which will be released in November 2012. Two biggest news are the access to SQL Server Analysis Services cubes and the integration with Teradata “by pushing all aggregations, filtering and complex calculations used for interactive visualization into the (Teradata) database”.
Spotfire team “rewrote” its in-memory engine for v. 5.0 to take advantage of high-capacity, multi-core servers. “Spotfire 5 is capable of handling in-memory data volumes orders of magnitude greater than the previous version of the Spotfire analytics platform” said Lars Bauerle, vice president of product strategy at TIBCO Spotfire.
Another addition is “in-database analysis” which allows to apply analytics within the database platforms (such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Teradata) without extracting and moving data, while handling analyses on Spotfire server and returning result sets back to the database platform.
Spotfire added new Tibco Enterprise Runtime for R, which embeds R runtime engine into the Spotfire statistical server. TIBCO claims that Spotfire 5.0 scales to tens of thousands of users! Spotfire 5 is designed to leverage the full family of TIBCO business optimization and big data solutions, including TIBCO LogLogic®, TIBCO Silver Fabric, TIBCO Silver® Mobile, TIBCOBusinessEvents®, tibbr® and TIBCO ActiveSpaces®.
Thanks for the post Andrei. I can’t see any reference on Tibco’s site to Spotfire 5 connecting to SQL Server 2012 in Tabular Mode. So Microsoft’s new columnar, in memory alternative to OLAP.
If Spotfire doesn’t connect to SQL in Tabular mode I find it interesting for a couple reasons
1) Like it or not Microsoft is a “Mega BI vendor”. They are really pushing Tabular to its large Business Intelligence customer base (the ones with BI or Ent editions of SQL 2012 anyway). I suspect a large proportion of Microsoft’s sizable BI installed base will migrate towards tabular models. Rapid dev time & simplicity (like we see in PowerPivots) are the compelling reasons for this.
2) The mode (TABULAR or OLAP) is defined when SQL 2012 is installed. So once the mode is defined, BI teams are are stuck with it, unless they do a complete SSAS reinstall.
3)Microsoft don’t have a compelling Visual Analytics tool (I won’t mention your debate with Donald Farmer re PivotView here ! :).
By not allowing connections to SQL tabular models I suspect Spotfire is cutting off a significant proportion Microsoft BI users who could have been potential customers of Spotfire 5 (or Tableau or Qlikview).
Data Visualization 
September 26, 2012 at 1:17 am
Thanks for the post Andrei. I can’t see any reference on Tibco’s site to Spotfire 5 connecting to SQL Server 2012 in Tabular Mode. So Microsoft’s new columnar, in memory alternative to OLAP.
If Spotfire doesn’t connect to SQL in Tabular mode I find it interesting for a couple reasons
1) Like it or not Microsoft is a “Mega BI vendor”. They are really pushing Tabular to its large Business Intelligence customer base (the ones with BI or Ent editions of SQL 2012 anyway). I suspect a large proportion of Microsoft’s sizable BI installed base will migrate towards tabular models. Rapid dev time & simplicity (like we see in PowerPivots) are the compelling reasons for this.
2) The mode (TABULAR or OLAP) is defined when SQL 2012 is installed. So once the mode is defined, BI teams are are stuck with it, unless they do a complete SSAS reinstall.
3)Microsoft don’t have a compelling Visual Analytics tool (I won’t mention your debate with Donald Farmer re PivotView here ! :).
By not allowing connections to SQL tabular models I suspect Spotfire is cutting off a significant proportion Microsoft BI users who could have been potential customers of Spotfire 5 (or Tableau or Qlikview).
Any thoughts?
Regards Steve