Spotfire 14.0 is a new Long term Support release and provides new features for sharing KPIs and Tables, integrating with data sources using OAuth2/OIDC, making it easier to use open source R and deploying Spotfire on Ubuntu, Red Hat and Debian.

Share insights in enhanced KPI charts and with nicely formatted exports to Excel, and deploy your Spotfire system on cloud or on-premises with Red Hat, Ubuntu or Debian Linux distributions. Leverage the R universe of data science algorithms and better integration with data sources using OAuth2/OIDC authentication and authorization. More than 80 new features have been added since the last Long Term Support release, Spotfire 12.0 LTS.

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Visual Analytics

Scalable and formatted KPI charts

Dynamically scaling KPI charts makes it easier to share analyses that will be consumed by users using different types of screens. Use fine-grained settings to control the appearance of KPI charts such as the font size and the number of KPIs per row. These settings help report developers seeking to convey essential metrics and performance indicators effectively, in a clear and concise way, for users on any device and screen.

Share formatted table visualizations as Excel spreadsheets

Share insights, results, and data in pretty formatted spreadsheets with Spotfire?s ?What You See Is What You Get? Excel export. Tables, cross tables, summary tables, and graphical tables are exported WYSIWYG, preserving layout, styling, and formatting. No more manual formatting to make the spreadsheet look like the table in Spotfire, export and easily share with your colleagues, and you?re done.

Find your favorite analysis faster

Favorites makes it dead easy to find your most commonly used analysis, data source or any library asset you want. Just add them as favorite assets when browsing the library, and then easily find them in the favorites section when starting Spotfire, or when adding additional assets to your analysis.

Favorites was originally launched in Spotfire 12.5.

Easier and smoother data wrangling

Wrangle your data using the popular Data canvas, which is now even better. The new sidebar provides a better overview of all the data tables and data functions in your analysis, configure key columns, data properties, and reload data directly from the Data canvas. Add column descriptions, geocoding settings, copy column formatting, and sort orders from the Data in the analysis flyout.

Data Access

Connectivity single sign-on

Enjoy smoother authentication in Information Services data sources when connecting to data using OAuth2 and OpenID Connect refresh tokens that can be reused across sessions, and support for different identity providers for Spotfire and the data source. Less prompting and interruption make it easier to focus on the analytics task at hand by avoiding repetitive logins.

These improvements were releases in Spotfire 12.5.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Spotfire now supports accessing data from Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

Google Analytics 4 is the current generation of Google Analytics. Google is retiring the previous generation, Universal Analytics, which Spotfire already supports. From this version of Spotfire, to access your legacy Universal Analytics data, select Connect to > Google Analytics (Universal Analytics).

Databricks Unity Catalog

The Spotfire connector for Databricks now supports accessing data from Databricks Unity Catalog.

Data Science

Bring your own R environment

Power your visualizations with seamlessly integrated data science built using the vast universe of open-source R packages for data science available for mathematics, statistics, and industry-specific applications.

The Spotfire Service for R enables you to bring your own R environment to Spotfire. With open-source R, users can leverage R packages and libraries developed for your own flavor of R, unlocking a wider range of statistical and data analysis techniques with more options and flexibility to address diverse analytical and data science tasks.

BYOA - Bring your own Python

Often developers require to use a specific Python version and Python modules versions.

You can now deploy and use your preferred Python distribution with the Spotfire Service for Python.

BYOA "Bring Your Own Application" allows users to choose their applications, instead of the preselected by the employer or the predefined by the software suite.

Note: To use an alternative Python distribution, install the Python packages and set the environment variable SPOTFIRE_PYTHON_HOME to point to that installation. If the environment variable SPOTFIRE_PYTHON_HOME is not specified, then Python service will use the bundled version of Python.

Note: For consistency, the deployed Python version must be the same for all the Spotfire Service for Python instances within the same Spotfire deployment area.

Note: Python 3.7 or higher is required.

Administration

Configure version history per analysis

An analyst can enable or disable the version history setting per analysis in the library from within the Spotfire Analyst client.

You can modify this setting for the current opened analysis within the Library section options in the Document Properties dialog. You need write permissions on the analysis for changing this setting.

A system administrator can configure if the version history is enabled or disabled on every item by default. If enabled, end users can opt out of saving versions for the analysis file they work on, if disabled by default, the end user can instead opt in to save versions of the analysis they are working on.

Note: For more information, see the Switching off library versioning in the Spotfire® Server and Environment - Installation and Administration manual.

SCIM API includes sub-attribute type

RFC7643 defines a sub-attribute of the groups attribute called type with the defined values direct and indirect.

The groups attribute of the SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) user schema now includes the type sub-attribute.

When using the SCIM API with the type sub-attribute, it is possible to determine which groups a user or group is a direct member of.

SCIM API supports pagination

The Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) API now supports pagination.

Improved graceful shutdown behavior for Spotfire Server instances

You can now perform a rolling restart (e.g. one at a time) of Spotfire Server instances when a graceful shutdown is initiated.

A graceful shutdown is initiated:

when it is explicitly called (e.g. with graceful-shutdown.sh)
when configuration changes are detected (disabled by default). To enable this setting, set lifecycle.changes-monitoring.draining.rolling.enabled to true.

Note: To configure how long a Spotfire Server instance should wait for another instance, set lifecycle.changes-monitoring.draining.rolling.maxwait-seconds. The default is lifecycle.changes-monitoring.draining.timeout-seconds (default 120 seconds).

Note: For larger clusters, it might be beneficial to restart more than one instance at a time. If so, set lifecycle.changes-monitoring.draining.rolling.max-unavailable to the desired value. The default is 1.

Note: For more information, see Graceful shutdown configuration settings, in the Spotfire documentation.

Better Scheduled Updates load distribution

Scheduled updates (SU) now assign destinations when this is claimed from the queue for initial loading of analysis files. In previous Spotfire versions, the destination for a job was assigned at enqueue time. Updates are handled as before.

In addition to this change, when there are many instances with available slots, each instance takes one item until all available slots are filled, or until the queue is empty. This change affects both Automation Services and Scheduled Updates job handling.

This provides a much better load distribution for cases with either uneven load duration or when some instance is restarted, since the routing decision to an instance is decided only if there is an available scheduled updates slot.

Note: Depending on of the number of SU started around the same time, the difference in load time for each SU, and the number of Spotfire Web Player instances available, you might need to change the configured concurrentUpdates value in the Spotfire Web Player service configuration.

Note: To revert to the previous behavior, set the configuration option scheduled-updates.compatibility.assign-destination-before-queuing to true. For more information, see the Spotfire.Dxp.Worker.Web.config file documentation.

New command to list the number of named users per named user license that Spotfire has been assigned to

The new server Command Line Interface command show-named-users-licenses provides a summary of how many user that have been assigned Spotfire named users licenses, such as Spotfire Analyst, Spotfire Business Author and Spotfire Consumer.

This makes it easy for system administrators to ensure they are deploying the Spotfire licenses to the correct number of named users for each product license.

Example usage:

$ config show-named-user-licenses
License                     Users
-------------------------- -----
Spotfire Analyst            1
Spotfire Business Author    3
Spotfire Consumer           2
Spotfire Network Analytics  0

To extract detailed information about licenses and users, see cli command 'show-licenses'

The above example shows the output of the show-named-users-licenses command, and in this case means that the admin of the system have assigned 1 Spotfire Analyst named user, 3 Spotfire Business Author named users, and 2 Spotfire Consumer named users.

For more details about Spotfire Product Licensing please see: https://docs.tibco.com/pub/spotfire_server/latest/doc/html/TIB_sfire_server_tsas_admin_help/server/topics/spotfire_product_licenses.html

System requirements and capabilities

Eclipse Temurin is the embedded JDK

The Spotfire installation packages now include the Eclipse Temurin OpenJDK instead of the Oracle Java Development Kit used in previous versions.

Note: Eclipse Temurin is the name of the OpenJDK distribution from Adoptium. The Eclipse Adoptium Working Group is the successor of AdoptOpenJDK. The primary goal of Adoptium is to promote and support free and open-source high-quality runtimes and associated technology for use across the Java ecosystem.

Debian 12 is now supported for the Spotfire platform

Debian 12 is now supported as the operating system for all Spotfire services.
Note: Debian 12 "bookworm" was released on 2023-06-10. Debian releases typically have 5 years support.

PostgreSQL 15 supported as the Spotfire DB

Spotfire now supports PostgreSQL version 15 as the Spotfire Server DB.

PostgreSQL version 15 is the latest stable version. PostgreSQL version 15 is the latest version supported by the major Cloud providers.

SQL Server 2022 supported as the Spotfire DB

Spotfire now supports SQL Server 2022 as the Spotfire Server DB.

Microsoft SQL Server 2022 is the latest stable version. Microsoft SQL Server 2022 is the latest version supported by the major Cloud providers.

APIs / SDK

Library REST API for Library asset management

The new Library REST API (v2) allows an external application to manage library assets.

The Library REST API supports the following operations:

list items
show item details
download item
upload item
delete item
search items using library search expressions

The Library REST API supports also version history operations.

The Library REST API simplifies promotion and migration operations between Spotfire environments and facilitates automation with CI/CD pipelines.

Note: For easy documentation reference, you can browse the API documentation with the Swagger UI: https://acme/spotfire/api/swagger-ui.html?urls.primaryName=library-v2.

Note: For easy development of stubs in any language, you can download the OAS (Open API Specification) from: https://acme/spotfire/api/v2/api-docs?group=library-v2 .

Distribution file bundle

It is now possible to, in addition to package files (.spk), also bundle distribution files (.sdn) into a distribution file. This allows for easier distribution of multiple products as one distributable unit and at the same time maintaining the products separately.

New APIs to customize the KPI chart

Additions to the KPI chart API give developers more control over the KPI chart's visual layout and formatting.

The following properties have been added to the KpiChart class:

MinVisibleTiles - The minimum number of visible tiles in the KPI chart.
MinTilesPerRow - The number of tiles to show per row.
NewRowPerKpi - When enabled, the tiles for each KPI start on their own row.
ShowTitlesForKpis - Displays the KpiVisualization Title above each KPI.
AdditionalSpacingBetweenKpis - Adds additional spacing between KPIs.
BaseFontMetadata - Allows overriding the base font used in the KPI chart.
PreferredRelativeTileWidth - Sets the minimum tile width.

And more...

Since the last Spotfire LTS, Spotfire 12.0, more than 80 new features for Analysts, Consumers, and Administrators have been implemented. See the full list below.