Analytics tools tips and tricks

Copied from spotfire help manuals  Details on Data Source Settings – Credentials To reach the Data Source Settings dialog: Select Edit > Data Connection Properties and click on Settings... or edit a data connection from within the Manage Data Connections tool. Response: The Data Connection Settings dialog is displayed. On the Data Source tab, click on Settings... . Click on Credentials to go to this tab. Option Description Save to Library [Only available for embedded data sources.] Allows you to publish an embedded data source to the library, so that it may be reused in other analyses or by other people. Embed in Connection [Only available for data sources shared in library.] In order to make any changes to the data source settings when you are within the context of a data connection , the data source must first be embedded in the connection . Click on this button to embed the data source.

When creating the bootstrap for the first time, after your provide the details of your SQL server instance, you may run into an erro like below "Error connecting to the specified data source. The TCP/IP connection to the host XXXX, port 1433  has failed. This is most likely because your SQL server has not enabled the TCP/IP protocol. Here are the steps to enable it. Open SQL Server Configuration Manager from start menu Expand the “SQL server network configuration”  and select protocol for “XXX” where XXX is your server instance name Check if TCP/IP protocol is enabled. You can right click and enable it if it is not After enabling right click and select properties, switch to IP Addresses Tab. Scroll down to IPALL . Change TCP portal to 1433 or other port as desired . Empty to Dynamic ports value if any present. Hit Apply Then restart the sql server services from the same panel or windows services panel

MDX with Custom Queries Spotfire Custom Query capability is great for SQL-based data extraction, however it can also be used to extract data using MDX or other non-SQL based query language.  This can be done by injecting the custom syntax inside a SQL FROM clause. You can also save the Query/Connection to Spotfire Library and then reuse across multiple analysis.  Here’s an example of passing MDX using a SQL Server connection.  In this scenario, the OPENQUERY function is used inside the FROM clause in order to pass the MDX to a linked MSAS Cube. Once connected, the data can be used in-memory or kept external.  The data connection behaves just like a standard SQL-based data connection. how to create connected server http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff772782.aspx

Time Dimensions are everywhere. It is highly possible that you are recording time dimension with every data point you are capturing.  Every business pretty much uses the time dimension in some way or the other. Some patterns in time are easy to guess and you don’t need analytics for that.e.g. What day of week do I see more customers walk into my store? Easy to guess. What months of the year I will sell spike in gifts items? Easy to guess, isn’t it? But what if you didn’t know the pattern and want a quick and easy way to shuffle between time dimensions to find that insight from all the data you captured? Wouldn’t it be great for a Spotfire user to have flexibility to see data aggregated at different levels like “Hour of the day”, “Daily”, “Monthly”, “Day of Week”. Good news is Spotfire provides all these calculations in single click for a column whose Datatype is date. Each Date field you can decide how you want to display the time dimension. These are options you can