Benefits of using Spotfire Statistica® objects in Spotfire®

Statistica Enterprise 

An enterprise installation of Spotfire Statistica® typically includes server implementations to share, scale, and maintain the Statistica ecosystem. This server implementation includes a shared server meta-repository called Statistica Enterprise or shortly Enterprise. In this meta-repository, all the users can share their data configurations, analysis configurations, analytical workflows (called Workspaces), and many other objects. The larger the implementation and number of users the larger amount of objects that are defined, maintained, and shared. This Enterprise meta-repository supports for example versioning, access permissions, approvals for various objects as well as a full log of the activity of users. In addition, parts of the solution could be special servers for monitoring and alerting (called Monitoring and Alerting Server), real-time scoring (LiveScore server), or a data entry module for advanced manual data entry features.

If we look at the objects which are versioned and maintained inside Enterprise, we have the following most important objects:

• Users and groups (for the administration of users)
• Database Connections (objects for defining what data sources could be accessed)
• Data Configurations (defined queries to databases leveraging Database connections)
• Workspaces (analytical visual workflows with all the steps of analysis, typically could use Data configurations as data inputs) 
• Models (trained analytical PMML models which can be used independently or inside scoring workspaces)
• Reports (report templates for producing automatic static reports, typically leveraging results from workspaces)
• Alarm Dashboards (traffic lights dashboards based on the results of regularly scheduled jobs and their alerts) 
• Data Entry Setups (objects defining how web data entry form will look like)

An example of a project with data configurations, models, workspaces, and reports:

Outline

This article is about the benefits of using the data function feature in Spotfire to access the most relevant objects from the Statistica meta-repository directly from Spotfire. To take advantage of the features described in this article, we have developed data functions that are available for download on these community Exchange pages:

• Data Reader for Spotfire Statistica® Enterprise using Spotfire®
• Monitoring and Alerting with Spotfire Statistica® using Spotfire®
• Templates for Statistica® Data Entry in Spotfire®

And there are some further resources we created supporting the content of this article:

• A video explaining the benefits and how to use these features in this video: 
• Details on the Statistica Data Function in Spotfire, how it works, and how to enable it can be found here.

Any Enterprise Data Configuration (Feature 1)

The first feature that using Data Reader for Spotfire Statistica® Enterprise using Spotfire® provides is that it enables uploading any data from Statistica Enterprise into Spotfire for potential further interactive analysis, more precisely the data defined in the Data Configuration object. This works regardless of the type of database or query under the hood of the data configuration. The data function will leverage your installed Statistica to open the data in the same way as you would access this through the Statistica client. It will then bring this data into the memory of the Spotfire application.

This data function is very powerful because you can get any dataset already defined in Statistica Enterprise into Spotfire without configuring additional settings. You only need a path to the data configuration inside Statistica Enterprise meta-repository.

The data function itself is a single node that queries underlying data sources based on the setting in Enterprise Data Configuration.

The path to the Data Configuration object is parameterizable and can be specified from Spotfire. This is the one and only parameter of this data function. This can be done in various ways, for example by inserting the path manually in the text field or by selecting a row with the path from a preprepared table.

If you have your Statistica environment set up with many datasets defined in it, this is a perfect data function for you to jump-start any interactive investigations in Spotfire without the need of defining any data connections.  

The Data Reader for Spotfire Statistica® Enterprise using Spotfire® is available to download from Exchange section of the community. 

Any Result from Any Workspace (Feature 2)

The second valuable feature that Data Reader for Spotfire Statistica® Enterprise using Spotfire® provides is a data function that is able to upload specified output from a specified Statistica Workspace into Spotfire. A Workspace could live on the disk or in the Enterprise meta-repository. In other words, almost any result from any Workspace in your Statistica platform can be retrieved in Spotfire for further interactive analysis.

This data function contains a node, which triggers a run of other specified Workspace. 

The data function is constructed in the way that the input for the data function is in the form of a table with two columns, more precisely one line of that table, with one column providing a path to the workspace, and the other column providing the name of the node which brings back the results in the form of a downstream document. Here is an example of input lines for the data function and the results which will be retrieved when these lines are sent into the data function: 

If you would like to try out this feature, you can download the data function from the Exchange section of the community. 

Monitoring and Alerting of Statistica in Spotfire (Feature 3)

As mentioned, one of the TIBCO Statistica® server components is the Monitoring and Alerting Server (MAS). MAS is dedicated to running scheduled tasks and, in case of an alert, will notify the user with an email or other specified notification. Tasks are typically arranged in separate dashboards within Statistica Server, and we will refer to these as MAS dashboards. In the Statistica Server web interface, you can find them in Enterprise/Alarm Dashboards section:

A typical MAS dashboard will have an analysis under each tile, which can trigger an alert or another hierarchically nested dashboard:

The data function Monitoring and Alerting with Spotfire Statistica® using Spotfire® gets information about the status of these red/green (or yellow) tiles in all MAS dashboards inside Statistica Enterprise. Thanks to this, you can create a Spotfire application that will replicate the exact state of any MAS dashboard from your Statistica ecosystem, and much more.

Here is the view of almost the same dashboard as above in Spotfire with all of Spotfire's interactivity and drill-down features available. 

We can even see the summary info about all the MAS dashboards together, including reports of MAS dashboards that stopped working, or the option to filter to the most problematic dashboards:

More details and the complete assets for replicating these MAS dashboards in your environment can be downloaded from Exchange section of the community.

Potential future use cases

If we look at Feature 1 above, extracting the data defined in the Statistica meta-repository, we can see that the data function is consisting only of one node, which is 'Enterprise Data Configuration'.

Additional valuable nodes which could be used with the same approach could be for example:

• Write to Database (saving data/table results analyzed through Spotfire in some of the databases connected via Statistica without the need of touching Statistica or the database) 
• Export Data (possibility to save data/table results investigated through Spotfire in Statistica Enterprise meta-repository and have them right away available by Feature 1 of this article)
• Spotfire Library (saving results to Spotfire library through Statistica data function, maybe relevant with some additional data prep steps)
• Email Upstream Data (possibility to email data/table results investigated through Spotfire)

More advanced potential use cases:

• Send the data from Spotfire and let them be scored by the model stored in Statistica Enterprise

"Normal" Data Functions

So far, we were focused on integration features with ready Statistica objects. But this is only a part of the integration between Statistica and Spotfire. It is also possible to use Statistica data functions in Spotfire in order to extend Spotfire with analytical features of Statistica. You can learn how to construct these data functions in this community article or you can watch one particular example in the first part of this video:

A powerful use-case is to combine these analytical data functions with integration data functions in one Spotfire application.

Important links

•  How to build TIBCO® Data Science - Workbench data functions in Spotfire
• Python and R data function
• Statistica Data Function in Spotfire
• Statistica Workspace - a graphical UI
• Most important nodes in Statistica Workspaces
• How to enable Statistica extension for Spotfire
• How to use Statistica extension for Spotfire
• How to install components for enabling running dashboards with Statistica data functions from the web 
• How to enable Statistica Service capability for Spotfire
• Spotfire Statistica® enablement Hub