What's New in Spotfire 10.2

Spotfire® 10.2 contains improvements in visual analytics, data wrangling, data access, and developer capabilities. You can now change header row height in tables with drag-and-drop and use shortcuts to switch between named pages. On the data access side, you are now able to provide Azure SQL access to users without giving them access to the master database. As a SAP HANA user you are probably planning to upgrade to SAP HANA 2. If so, you will appreciate that the Spotfire connector for SAP HANA now supports the latest SAP HANA version. The in-memory data engine now includes the functions lag and lead in its function library.

Spotfire® 10.2 finally adds a new modern and public REST API for upload of Spotfire Binary Data Format files (SBDF files) directly to Spotfire libraries on cloud and on-premises. This allows you to integrate your application directly with the Spotfire eco system. Combined with open source Java and C# libraries for reading and writing sbdf, you have everything you need to push data from your applications into Spotfire, for visual data discovery and advanced analytics.

Note that Spotfire® 10.2 is a mainstream version. Fixes to critical issues discovered after the release will only be made to the most current version and to any long-term supported versions. For more information on the difference between mainstream versions and long-term supported versions, see the documentation.

Visual Analytics

Change data and header row height in tables

It's now possible to change the row height in the table, cross table, graphical table and details-on-demand table by dragging with the mouse. This means that it is easier to create better looking, more readable, tables.

Go to page in titled tabs page navigation mode

For analyses using the titled tab navigation mode, Spotfire Consumer users can now navigate to any page by using a drop-down list. This makes it easier and quicker to go the desired page.

Data Access

Improved performance when loading STDF files

Spotfoire is now 2-20 times faster when importing STDF files from Spotfie. 

Azure SQL and Microsoft SQL Server authentication and authorization updates

Previously, when you used the Spotfire connector for Azure SQL and SQL Server, you could only select database from a list of available databases, as seen in the image below.

This is very convenient. However, to be able to select database this way, all users must have access to the master database, in which the list of databases available to Spotfire is kept. If you didn't have access to the master database, you couldn't connect to Azure SQL or SQL Server.

In Spotfire 10.2, however, you can specify the database manually. As seen in the image below, choose the option to enter a database name, type or paste a name, and then click Connect. This makes it possible to use the connector without having access to the master database.

The connector now also supports the authentication method 'Active Directory - Password', that you can use to connect to Azure SQL. For more details, refer to the Microsoft documentation, available here.

SAP HANA 2 support

The SAP HANA connector now supports SAP HANA 2. The connector supports both 'Relational data' and 'Multidimensional data'. You select the type of data in the connection dialog, as seen in the image below.

Data Wrangling

The in-memory data engine now supports the functions Lag and Lead

The in-memory data engine of Spotfire now supports the functions 'Lag' and 'Lead'. This is very handy, for example, when you create calculated columns where the value of a variable is dependent on the observation before the current observation. Sankey charts need such transformations and can now be easily implemented in Spotfire. The 'Lag' function delivers the value of a variable in the previous observation.

Example

VarX             VarY               lag(VarY)

1                     1

2                     2                          1

3                     3                          2

4                     4                          3

5                     5                          4

Developer

Library API for SBDF file upload

A new REST API lets external applications upload SBDF-formatted data to the Spotfire library. You can then easily access the data in multiple Spotfire analysis files using any Spotfire client connected to the same Spotfire library.

This is useful in scenarios where you want to analyze data in Spotfire as part of your workflow but the regular data access capabilities of Spotfire, including data connectors, local file access and custom data sources, cannot be used. For example, you might have data that is produced dynamically in an external analytic tool or the data might be stored in some proprietary database for which there is no Spotfire connector available. The Spotfire library has built-in support for managing access rights for its content. This can be used to control who can access your data files.

For documentation and examples, look here.

SBDF stands for Spotfire Binary Data Format, a compact and efficient data format that is optimized for Spotfire. SBDF files are created using a free Java or C# programming library, downloadable here.

API for column header height in Graphical Table

It is now possible to use the .Net API to configure the number of lines of text in the column header in a Graphical table.

API to export data as comma-separated files (.csv)

The .Net API for exporting data files now supports .csv formats with values separated by commas or semicolons, in addition to today's tab separated files.

Other improvements

When opening a dxp file, the progress dialog displays the file name