TIBCO Spotfire – A Comprehensive Primer

Book description

Create innovative enterprise-class informatics solutions using TIBCO Spotfire

In Detail

The need for agile business intelligence (BI) is growing daily, and TIBCO Spotfire combines a self-service feature set with essential enterprise governance capabilities to deliver analytics solutions. Spotfire is easy and intuitive to use and can also be a rewarding development environment for all BI users.

Starting with data and visualization concepts, this book takes you through increasingly advanced topics toward the goal of becoming a professional analytics solution provider. It explains data and visualization concepts and follows through with practical examples, such as getting data into Spotfire and using its visualization features. You will learn to build sophisticated user interactivity frameworks and spatial analytics, and administer the Spotfire environment.

This book ends with a case study on self-service BI and leaves you equipped to contribute to the demand for more agile BI.

What You Will Learn

  • Master core data concepts, model the source data, slice and dice dimensional data, and define metrics and key performance indicators
  • Learn to deploy Spotfire's suite of visualization types effectively and intelligently
  • Build user-friendly analytics frameworks with Spotfire text areas and property controls
  • Understand the different ways Spotfire can be deployed, licensed, and administered
  • Use Spotfire's location analytics capabilities to create interactive geographic and nongeographic spatial analyses
  • Write IronPython scripts against the Spotfire API to tackle and solve challenging analysis framework requirements
  • Combine all your newfound or enhanced data, visualization, and programming skills to build self-service business intelligence solutions
  • Explore Spotfire's predictive analytics, mobile metrics, event analytics, and advanced data services capabilities

Table of contents

  1. TIBCO Spotfire – A Comprehensive Primer
    1. Table of Contents
    2. TIBCO Spotfire – A Comprehensive Primer
    3. Credits
    4. Foreword
    5. About the Author
    6. About the Reviewers
    7. www.PacktPub.com
      1. Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more
        1. Why subscribe?
        2. Free access for Packt account holders
        3. Instant updates on new Packt books
    8. Preface
      1. What this book covers
      2. What you need for this book
      3. Who this book is for
      4. Conventions
      5. Reader feedback
      6. Customer support
        1. Downloading the example code
        2. Downloading the color images of this book
        3. Errata
        4. Piracy
        5. Questions
    9. 1. Show Me the Data
      1. Adding data to Spotfire from files
        1. Importing a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet into Spotfire
        2. Importing a text file into Spotfire
        3. Importing other file types into Spotfire
      2. Key data concept – basic row/column structure of a data table
      3. Key data concept – data types
      4. Using the inbuilt filters in Spotfire
      5. Key data concept – data relationships
      6. How to link data in Spotfire
        1. How to relate two tables
        2. Column matching
      7. Connecting to a database
        1. Using ODBC
        2. How to set up an ODBC connection in Microsoft Windows 7
        3. Using an ODBC connection in Spotfire
      8. Key data concept – data queries
        1. Anatomy of a SQL statement
      9. Summary
    10. 2. Visualize This!
      1. Displaying information quickly in tabular form
      2. Enriching your visualizations with color categorization
      3. Visualizing categorical information using bar charts
      4. Dividing a visualization across a trellis grid
      5. Key Spotfire concept – marking
        1. How to change the marking color
        2. How to set the marking behavior of a visualization
      6. Visualizing trends using line charts
      7. Visualizing proportions using pie charts
      8. Visualizing relationships using scatter plots
      9. Visualizing hierarchical relationships using treemaps
      10. Key Spotfire concept – filters
      11. Enhancing tabular presentations using graphical tables
      12. Summary
    11. 3. Analyze That!
      1. Framing your analysis using text areas
      2. Key Spotfire concept – document properties
      3. Increasing interactivity using property controls
      4. Providing summary information at a glance
      5. Customizing the filter panel
      6. Getting details of marked items
      7. Annotating data using tags and lists
        1. Using lists
        2. Using tags
      8. Creating analysis snapshots using bookmarks
      9. Summary
    12. 4. The Big Wide World of Spotfire
      1. An overview of Spotfire components and architecture
      2. A quick guide to Administration Manager
        1. Users
        2. Groups and Licenses
        3. Preferences
      3. Using the Library Administration interface
        1. Folder permissions
        2. Import and Export
      4. A quick tour of Information Designer
        1. Data Source
        2. Columns
        3. Join
        4. Filter
        5. Procedure
        6. Information Links
      5. An overview of Spotfire Analyst (formerly Professional Client)
      6. An overview of Spotfire Consumer (formerly web player)
      7. An overview of Spotfire Business Author (new with Version 6.5)
      8. Automating tasks using Automation Services
        1. Running Automation Services jobs
      9. An overview of system monitoring tools
        1. Spotfire 6.5
      10. Summary
    13. 5. Source Data is Never Enough
      1. Creating metrics using calculated columns
        1. Basic metric
        2. Dynamic metric
      2. Using the Data Panel tool
      3. Key data concept – dimensional hierarchies
      4. Adding dimensionality to your data by defining hierarchies
      5. Categorizing continuous numerical data using binning functions
      6. Slicing and dicing data using hierarchy nodes
        1. LastPeriods
        2. Parent
        3. PreviousPeriod
        4. ParallelPeriod
        5. NavigatePeriod
        6. Intersect
      7. Merging data from multiple sources
        1. Insert columns
        2. Insert rows
      8. Key data concept – narrow tables versus wide tables
      9. Transforming data structure through pivots and unpivots
        1. Unpivot
        2. Pivot
      10. Using Spotfire's Information Designer
        1. Building an information link to multiple source data tables
        2. Building an information link that writes data back to a database
      11. Optimizing complex data manipulations using in-database analytics
        1. Selecting data for a data connection
        2. Creating in-database views
      12. Summary
    14. 6. The World is Your Visualization
      1. Applying custom expressions directly to visualization properties
      2. Key Spotfire concept – difference between calculated columns and custom expressions
      3. Annotating visualizations with reference lines, fitted curves, and error bars
        1. Error bars
      4. Defining color rules and organizing document color schemes
      5. Slicing and dicing visualizations using hierarchy nodes
      6. Mashing up data from different tables in a single visualization
      7. How to create dynamic pivots using cross tables
        1. Pivot aggregations
        2. Cross tabulation
      8. Visualizing categorical information and trends together in combination charts
      9. Visualizing statistical measures using box and whisker plots
      10. Summarizing statistical measures using summary tables
      11. Visualizing complex multidimensional data using heat maps
        1. Heat maps
        2. Dendrograms
      12. Profiling your data using parallel coordinate plots
      13. Exporting and publishing data and visualizations
      14. Summary
    15. 7. What's Your Location?
      1. Creating background map layers
      2. Key Spotfire concept: map chart layers
      3. Key mapping concept – coordinate reference systems
      4. Using automatic geocoding to accurately position locations from your data on a map
        1. Geocoding
        2. Coordinate columns
      5. Incorporating and using a feature layer
        1. Geographic drill-down
      6. Adding Web Map Service data to a map chart
      7. Using the map chart for nongeographic spatial analysis
      8. Summary
    16. 8. The Secret Life of Python
      1. Introduction to IronPython
        1. Control structures
        2. Libraries
        3. Lists
        4. Functions
        5. Object orientation
      2. Overview of the Spotfire API
      3. Some useful external libraries
      4. Creating scripts
      5. Referencing and manipulating the primary elements in an analysis file
        1. Pages
          1. Example script
        2. Visualizations
          1. Example script
        3. Properties
          1. Example script
        4. Data tables
        5. Marking
        6. Panels
      6. How to manipulate visualization properties
        1. Generic visualization properties
          1. Example script
        2. Axes properties
          1. Example script
        3. Visualization-specific properties
        4. Cross table visualization
        5. Table visualization
          1. Script example
        6. Trellising
        7. Error bars
        8. Reference lines and curves
          1. Script example
      7. How to manipulate color
        1. Color by category
          1. Example script
        2. Color by rule
          1. Example script
        3. Gradient coloring
        4. Coloring tables and cross tables
          1. Example script
      8. How to manipulate filters
        1. Change a filter
          1. Script example
        2. Hide a filter group
      9. Manipulating data already loaded into Spotfire
        1. Reading a table
          1. Example script
        2. Marking and selecting data
          1. Example script 1
          2. Example script 2
        3. Calculated columns
          1. Example Script
      10. How to add data to an analysis
        1. Define a data source
        2. Add a column to a table
          1. Script example
        3. Add rows to a table
          1. Script example
      11. Summary
    17. 9. It's All About Self-service These Days
      1. Building a guided analysis
        1. Index page
        2. Projections page
        3. Department Performance page
        4. History Arrows
      2. Key data concept – metadata
      3. Incorporating configurable business rules into your analysis
        1. Example metadata table/spreadsheet
      4. A metadata-driven self-service analytics case study
        1. Metadata
          1. Representative metadata content
            1. BaseTable
            2. MetadataKpis
            3. MetadataBusinessRules
        2. Source data
        3. Base template
          1. KPI Page
        4. IronPython scripts
          1. Deployment page
          2. Runtime scripts
      5. Summary
    18. 10. Beyond the Horizon
      1. TIBCO Enterprise Runtime for R (TERR)
        1. Data functions
        2. Expression functions
        3. Predictive modeling
        4. Holt–Winters forecast
      2. JavaScript
      3. Mobile Metrics
        1. Setting up KPI sets
      4. Event analytics
        1. TIBCO StreamBase
        2. StreamBase and TERR
        3. Contextual analysis and mobile metrics
      5. Spotfire data connectors
        1. Hadoop
        2. Columnar databases
        3. Online analytical processing
        4. Teradata
        5. Cisco information server
      6. TIBCO Spotfire Advanced Data Services
        1. Data delivery
        2. Caching
        3. Metadata modeling
        4. Query engine
      7. Summary
    19. Index

Product information

  • Title: TIBCO Spotfire – A Comprehensive Primer
  • Author(s): Michael Phillips
  • Release date: February 2015
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781782176404