Book Image

TIBCO Spotfire: A Comprehensive Primer. - Second Edition

By : Andrew Berridge, Michael Phillips
Book Image

TIBCO Spotfire: A Comprehensive Primer. - Second Edition

By: Andrew Berridge, Michael Phillips

Overview of this book

The need for agile business intelligence (BI) is growing daily, and TIBCO Spotfire® combines self-service features with essential enterprise governance and scaling capabilities to provide best-practice analytics solutions. Spotfire is easy and intuitive to use and is a rewarding environment for all BI users and analytics developers. Starting with data and visualization concepts, this book takes you on a journey through increasingly advanced topics to help you work toward becoming a professional analytics solution provider. Examples of analyzing real-world data are used to illustrate how to work with Spotfire. Once you've covered the AI-driven recommendations engine, you'll move on to understanding Spotfire's rich suite of visualizations and when, why and how you should use each of them. In later chapters, you'll work with location analytics, advanced analytics using TIBCO Enterprise Runtime for R®, how to decide whether to use in-database or in-memory analytics, and how to work with streaming (live) data in Spotfire. You'll also explore key product integrations that significantly enhance Spotfire's capabilities.This book will enable you to exploit the advantages of the Spotfire serve topology and learn how to make practical use of scheduling and routing rules. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to build and use powerful analytics dashboards and applications, perform spatial analytics, and be able to administer your Spotfire environment efficiently
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Introducing Spotfire
6
Section 2: Spotfire In Depth
12
Section 3: Databases, Scripting, and Scaling Spotfire

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Welcome to Spotfire, introduces Spotfire, showing the different Spotfire clients and how to get started with them. It jumps right into analytics with a real-world example of analyzing data from the Titanic disaster.

Chapter 2, It's All About the Data, covers how to work with data in Spotfire by way of building a scatter plot showing world population growth. Along the way, the chapter discusses how to build detailed visualizations to gain additional insights.

Chapter 3, Impactful Dashboards!, shows how to construct attention-grabbing dashboards using KPI charts.

Chapter 4, Sharing Insights and Collaborating with Others, discusses how to share insights with others and how to use Spotfire's collaboration features.

Chapter 5, Practical Applications of Spotfire Visualizations, is a tour through some of the most frequently used visualizations in Spotfire's toolbox. It gives useful hints and tips as to how to use visualizations to their best effect and details common pitfalls to avoid.

Chapter 6, The Big Wide World of Spotfire, introduces the Spotfire platform. It covers scaling in brief and shows some of Spotfire's administration tools. It also introduces Automation Services.

Chapter 7, Source Data is Never Enough, covers data manipulation in Spotfire—creating calculated columns, working with custom expressions, and transforming data.

Chapter 8, The World is Your Visualization, rounds off what has been learned so far. It covers data relationships, adding smoothing and forecasting lines, error bars, and working with Spotfire's subsets and show/hide features. It finishes off by covering the final two visualization types that haven't yet been discussed.

Chapter 9, What's Your Location?, covers map charts and geo-analytics in Spotfire. It also introduces the concept of data functions and TIBCO Enterprise Runtime for R.

Chapter 10, Information Links and Data Connectors, shows you how to work with information links and data connectors in Spotfire. These features are important if you're working with anything other than flat files. In-database versus in-memory data is discussed, along with all the tools you'll need to work with both. The chapter also covers streaming (live) data.

Chapter 11, Scripting, Advanced Analytics, and Extensions, introduces how to work with IronPython and JavaScript in Spotfire. It covers how to work with the many and varied data science platforms that integrate with Spotfire and explains how to get started with developing custom extensions.

Chapter 12, Scaling the Infrastructure; Keeping Data up to Date, is designed primarily for Spotfire administrators. It shows how to scale up the Spotfire infrastructure to support as many users as you need. It also details the various mechanisms for keeping data in Spotfire files up to date, showcasing schedules and rules.

Chapter 13, Beyond the Horizon, covers searching in Spotfire, styling and theming, exporting, conditional alerting, JavaScript visualizations, and some additional products that work nicely with Spotfire.