Discover, Analyze, Explore, Pivot, Drilldown, Visualize your data… “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” [E.M. Forster, G. Wallas, A. Gide]
Below you can find samples of Guidelines and Good Practices for Data Visualization (mostly with Tableau), which I used recently.
Some of this samples are Tableau-specific, but others (may be with modifications) can be reused for other Data Visualization Platform and tools. I will appreciate feedback, comments and suggestions.
Naming Convention for Tableau Objects
Use CamelCase Identifiers: Capitalize the 1st letter of each concatenated word
Use Suffix for Identifiers with preceding underscore to indicate the type (example: _tw for workbooks).
Workbook Sizing Guidelines
Use Less than 5 Charts per Dashboard, Minimize the number of Visible TABs/Worksheets
Move Calculations and Functions from Workbook to the Data.
Use less than 5000 Data-points per Chart/Dashboard to enable Client-side rendering.
To enable Shared Sessions, don’t use filters and interactivity if it is not needed.
Guidelines for Colors, Fonts, Sizes
To express desirable/undesirable points, use green for good, red for bad, yellow for warning.
When you are not describing “Good-Bad situation” (thanks to feedback of visitor under alias “SF”) , try to use pastel, neutral and blind colors, e.g. similar to “Color Blind 10” Palette from Tableau.
Use “web-safe” fonts, to approximate what users can see from Tableau Server.
Use either auto-resize or standard (target smaller screen) sizes for Dashboards
Data and Data Connections used with Tableau
Try to avoid pulling more than 15000 rows for Live Data Connections.
For Data Extract-based connections 10M rows is the recommended maximum.
For widely distributed Workbooks use of Application IDs instead of Personal Credentials.
Job failure due expired credentials leads to suspension from Schedule, so try to keep embedded credentials up to date
Tableau Data Extracts (TDE)
If Refresh of TDE takes more than 2 hours, consider to redesign it.
Reuse and share TDEs and Data Sources as much as possible.
Use of Incremental Data Refresh instead of Full Refresh when possible.
Designate Unique ID for each row when Incremental Data Refresh is used.
Try to use free Tableau Data Exract API instead of licensed Tableau Server to create Data Extracts
Scheduling of Background Tasks with Tableau
Serial Schedules is recommended; avoid the usage of hourly Schedules.
Avoid scheduling during peak hours (8am-6pm), consider weekly instead of daily schedules.
Optimize Schedule Size, group tasks related to the same project into one Schedule, if total tasks execution exceeds 8 hours, split Schedule on a few with similar Name but preferably with different starting time.
Maximize the usage of Monthly and Weekly Schedules (as oppose to Daily Schedules) and usage of weekends and nights.
Guidelines for using Charts
Use Bars to compare across categories, use Colors with Stacked or Side-by-Side Bars for deeper Analysis
Use Line for Viewing Trends over time, consider Area Charts for Multi-lines
Minimize the usage of Pie Charts; when appropriate – use it for showing proportions. It is recommended to limit pie wedges to six.
Use Map to show geocoded data, consider use maps as interactive filters
Use Scatter to analyze outliers, clusters and construct regressions
Tableau Software filed for IPO, on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “DATA”. In sharp contrast to other business-software makers that have gone public in the past year, Tableau is profitable, despite hiring huge number of new employees. For the years ended December 31, 2010, 2011 and 2012, Tableau’s total revenue were $34.2 million, $62.4 million and $127.7 million for 2012. Number of full-time employees increased from 188 as of December 31, 2010 to 749 as of December 31, 2012.
Tableau’s biggest shareholder is venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, with a 38 percent stake. Founder Pat Hanrahan owns 18 percent, while co-founders Christopher Stolte and Christian Chabot, who is also chief executive officer, each own more than 15 percent. Meritech Capital Partners controls 6.4 percent. Tableau recognized three categories of Primary Competitors:
large suppliers of traditional business intelligence products, like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP AG;
spreadsheet software providers, such as Microsoft Corporation
business analytics software companies: Qlik Technologies Inc. and TIBCO Spotfire.
Update 4/29/13: This news maybe related to Tableau IPO: I understand that Microstrategy’s growth cannot be compared with growth of Tableau or even Qliktech. But to go below of the average “BI market” growth? Or even 6% or 24% decrease? What is going on (?) here : “First quarter 2013 revenues were $130.2 million versus $138.3 million for the first quarter of 2012, a 6% decrease. Product licenses revenues for the first quarter of 2013 were $28.4 million versus $37.5 million for the first quarter of 2012, a 24% decrease.”
Update 5/6/13: Tableau Software Inc. will sell 5 million shares, while shareholders will sell 2.2 million shares, Tableau said in an amended filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The underwriters have the option to purchase up to an additional 1,080,000 shares. It means total can be 8+ millions of shares for sale.
The company expects its initial public offer to raise up to $215.3 million at a price of $23 to $26 per share. If this happened, that will create public company with large capitalization, so Qliktech and Spotfire will have an additional problem to worry about. This is how QLIK (blue line), TIBX (red) and MSTR (orange line) stock behaved during last 6 weeks after release of Tableau 8 and official Tableau IPO announcement:
Update 5/16/13: According to this article at Seeking Alpha (also see S-1 Form) Tableau Software Inc. (symbol “DATA”) is scheduled a $176 million IPO with a market capitalization of $1.4 billion for Friday, May 17, 2013. Tableau’s March Quarter sales were up 60% from the March ’12 quarter. Qliktech’s sales were up only 23% on a similar comparative basis.
According to other article, Tableau raised it IPO price and it may reach capitalization of $2B by end of Friday, 5/17/13. That is almost comparable with capitalization of Qliktech…
Update 5/17/13: Tableau’s IPO offer price was $31 per share, but it started today
with price $47 and finished day with $50.75 (raising $400M in one day) with estimated Market Cap around $3B (or more?). It is hard to understand the market: Tableau Stock (symbol: DATA) finished its first day above $50 with Market Capitalization higher than QLIK, which today has Cap = $2.7B but Qliktech has almost 3 times more of sales then Tableau!
For comparison MSTR today has Cap = $1.08B and TIBX today has Cap = $3.59B. While I like Tableau, today proved that most investors are crazy, if you compare numbers in this simple table:
Symbol :
Market Cap, $B, as of 5/17/13
Revenue, $M, as of 3/31/13 (trailing 12 months)
FTE (Full Time Employees)
TIBX
3.59
1040
3646
MSTR
1.08
586
3172
QLIK
2.67
406
1425
DATA
between $2B and $3B?
143
834
See interview with Co-Founder of Tableau Software Christian Chabot – he discusses taking the company’s IPO with Emily Chang on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg West.” However it makes me sad when Tableau’s CEO is implying that Tableau is ready for big data, which is not true.
Today Tableau 8 was released with 90+ new features (actually it may be more than 130) after exhausting 6+ months of Alpha and Beta Testing with 3900+ customers as Beta Testers! I personally expected it it 2 months ago, but I rather will have it with less bugs and this is why I have no problem with delay. During this “delay” Tableau Public achieved the phenomenal Milestone: 100 millions of users…
Tableau 8 introduced:
web and mobile authoring,
added access to new data sources: Google Analytics, Salesforce.com, Cloudera Impala, DataStax Enterprise, Hadapt, Hortonworks Hadoop Hive, SAP HANA, and Amazon Redshift.
New Data Extract API that allows programmers to load data from anywhere into Tableau and make certain parts of Tableau Licensing ridiculous, because consuming part of licensing (for example core licensing) for background tasks should be set free now.
New JavaScript API enables integration with business (and other web-) applications.
Local Rendering: leveraging the graphics hardware acceleration available on ordinary computers. Tableau 8 Server dynamically determines where rendering will complete faster – on the server or in the browser. Also – and acts accordingly. Also Dashboards now render views in parallel when possible.
Tableau Software plans to add in next versions (after 8.0) some very interesting and competitive features, like:
Direct query of large databases, quick and easy ETL and data integration.
Tableau on a Mac and Tableau as a pure Cloud offering.
Make statistical & analytical techniques accessible (I wonder if it means integration with R?).
Tableau founder Pat Hanrahan recently talked about “Showing is Not Explaining”, so Tableau planned to add features that support storytelling by constructing visual narratives and effective communication of ideas.
I did not see on Tableau’s roadmap some very long overdue features like 64-bit implementation (currently even all Tableau Server processes, except one, are 32-bit!), Server implementation on Linux (we do not want to pay Windows 2012 Server CAL taxes to Bill Gates) and direct mentioning of integration with R like Spotfire does – I how those planning and strategic mistakes will not impact upcoming IPO.
I personally think that Tableau has to stop using its ridiculous practice when 1 core license used per each 1 Backgrounder server process and since Tableau Data Extract API is free so all Tableau Backgrounder Processes should be free and have to be able to run on any hardware and even any OS.
Tableau 8 managed to get the negative feedback from famous Stephen Few, who questioned Tableau’s ability to stay on course. His unusually long blog-post “Tableau Veers from the Path” attracted enormous amount of comments from all kind of Tableau experts. I will be cynical here and notice that there is no such thing as negative publicity and more publicity is better for upcoming Tableau IPO.
The most popular (among business users) approach to visualization is to use a Data Visualization (DV) tool like Tableau (or Qlikview or Spotfire), where a lot of features already implemented for you. Recent prove of this amazing popularity is that at least 100 million people (as of February 2013), used Tableau Public as their Data Visualization tool of choice, see
However, to make your documents and stories (and not just your data visualization applications) driven by your data, you may need the other approach – to code visualization of your data into your story and visualization libraries like popular D3 toolkit can help you. D3 stands for “Data-Driven Documents”. The Author of D3 Mr. Mike Bostock designs interactive graphics for New York Times – one of latest samples is here:
and NYT allows him to do a lot of Open Source work which he demonstartes at his website here:
Mike was a “visualization scientist” and a computer science PhD student at #Stanford University and member of famous group of people, now called “Stanford Visualization Group”:
This Visualization Group was a birthplace of Tableau’s prototype – sometimes they called it “a Visual Interface” for exploring data and other name for it is Polaris:
and we know that creators of Polaris started Tableau Software. One of other Group’s popular “products” was a graphical toolkit (mostly in JavaScript, as oppose to Polaris, written in C++) for Visualization, called ProtoVis:
– and Mike Bostock was one of ProtoViz’s main co-authors. Less then 2 years ago Visualization Group suddenly stopped developing ProtoViz and recommended to everybody to switch to D3 library
In order to use D3, you need to be comfortable with HTML, CSS, SVG, Javascript programming, DOM (and other Web Standards); understanding of jQuery paradigm will be useful too. Basically if you want to be at least partially as good as Mike Bostock, you need to have a mindset of a programmer (I guess in addition to business user mindset), like this D3 expert:
Most of successful early D3 adopters combining even 3+ mindsets: programmer, business analyst, data artist and even sometimes data storyteller. For your programmer’s mindset you may be interested to know that D3 has a large set of Plugins, see:
Human eye cannot process effectively more than a few (thousands) datapoints per View.
Additionally, in Data Visualization you have other restrictions:
number of pixels on your screen (may be 2-3 millions maximum) available for your View (Chart or Dashboard).
time to render millions of Datapoints can be too long and may create a bad User Experience (too much waiting).
time to load your Datapoints into your View; if you wish to have a good User Experience, than 2-3 seconds is maximum user can wait for. If you have a live connection to datasource, than 2-3 seconds mean a few thousands of Datapoints maximum.
again, more Datapoints you will put in your View, more crowded it will be and less useful and less understandable your View will be for your users.
Recently, some Vendors started to add new reason for you (called Local Rendering) to restrict yourself in terms of how much of Datapoints you need to put into your DataView: usage of Client-side hardware (especially its Graphical Hardware) for so called “Local Rendering”.
Local rendering means that Data Visualization Server will send DataPoints instead of Images to Client and Rendering of Image will happened on Client-side, using capability of modern Web Browsers (to use Client’s Hardware) and HTML5 Canvas technology.
For example, the new feature in Tableau Server 8 will automatically switch to Local Rendering if number of DataPoints in your DataView (Worksheet with your Chart or Dashboard) is less then 5000 DataPoints (Marks in Tableau Speak). In addition to faster rendering it means less round-trips to Server (for example when you hover your mouse over Datapoint, in old world it means round-trip to Server) and faster Drill-down, Selection and Filtering operations.
Update 3/19/13: James Baker from Tableau Software explains why Tableau 8 Dashboards in Web Browser feel more responsive:
James explained that “HTML5’s canvas element” is used as drawing surface. He underscored that it’s much faster to send images rather than data because image size does not scale up linearly. James included a short video shows incremental filtering in a browser, one of the features of Local Rendering.
This is the Part 2 of the guest blog post: the Review of Visual Discovery products from Advizor Solutions, Inc., written by my guest blogger Mr. Srini Bezwada (his profile is here: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=15840828 ), who is the Director of Smart Analytics, a Sydney based professional BI consulting firm that specializes in Data Visualization solutions. Opinions below belong to Mr. Srini Bezwada.
ADVIZOR Technology
ADVIZOR’s Visual Discovery™ software is built upon strong data visualization tools technology spun out of a distinguished research heritage at Bell Labs that spans nearly two decades and produced over 20 patents. Formed in 2003, ADVIZOR has succeeded in combining its world-leading data visualization and in-memory-data-management expertise with extensive usability knowledge and cutting-edge predictive analytics to produce an easy to use, point and click product suite for business analysis.
ADVIZOR readily adapts to business needs without programming and without implementing a new BI platform, leverages existing databases and warehouses, and does not force customers to build a difficult, time consuming, and resource intensive custom application. Time to deployment is fast, and value is high.
With ADVIZOR data is loaded into a “Data Pool” in main memory on a desktop or laptop computer, or server. This enables sub-second response time on any query against any attribute in any table, and instantaneously update all visualizations. Multiple tables of data are easily imported from a variety of sources.
With ADVIZOR, there is no need to pre-configure data. ADVIZOR accesses data “as is” from various data sources, and links and joins the necessary tables within the software application itself. In addition, ADVIZOR includes an Expression Builder that can perform a variety of numeric, string, and logical calculations as well as parse dates and roll-up tables – all in-memory. In essence, ADVIZOR acts like a data warehouse, without the complexity, time, or expense required to implement a data warehouse! If a data warehouse already exists, ADVIZOR will provide the front-end interface to leverage the investment and turn data into insight.
Data in the memory pool can be refreshed from the core databases / data sources “on demand”, or at specific time intervals, or by an event trigger. In most production deployments data is refreshed daily from the source systems.
Data Visualization
ADVIZOR’s Visual Discovery™ is a full visual query and analysis system that combines the excitement of presentation graphics – used to see patterns and trends and identify anomalies in order to understand “what” is happening – with the ability to probe, drill-down, filter, and manipulate the displayed data in order to answer the “why” questions. Conventional BI approaches (pre-dating the era of interactive Data Visualization) to making sense of data have involved manipulating text displays such as cross tabs, running complex statistical packages, and assembling the results into reports.
ADVIZOR’s Visual Discovery™ making the text and graphics interactive. Not only can the user gain insight from the visual representation of the data, but now additional insight can be obtained by interacting with the data in any of ADVIZOR’s fifteen (15) interactive charts, using color, selection, filtering, focus, viewpoint (panning, zooming), labeling, highlighting, drill-down, re-ordering, and aggregation.
Visual Discovery empowers the user to leverage his or her own knowledge and intuition to search for patterns, identify outliers, pose questions and find answers, all at the click of a mouse.
Flight Recorder – Track, Save, Replay your Analysis Steps
The Flight Recorder tracks each step in a selection and analysis process. It provides a record of those steps, and be used to repeat previous actions. This is critical for providing context to what and end-user has done and where they are in their data. Flight records also allow setting bookmarks, and can be saved and shared with other ADVIZOR users.
The Flight Recorder is unique to ADVIZOR. It provides:
• A record of what a user has done. Actions taken and selections from charts are listed. Small images of charts that have been used for selection show the selections that were made.
• A place to collect observations by adding notes and capturing images of other charts that illustrate observations.
• A tool that can repeat previous actions, in the same session on the same data or in a later session with updated data.
• The ability to save and name bookmarks, and share them with other users.
Predictive Analytics Capability
The ADVIZOR Analyst/X is a predictive analytic solution based on a robust multivariate regression algorithm developed by KXEN – a leading-edge advanced data mining tool that models data easily and rapidly while maintaining relevant and readily interpretable results.
Visualization empowers the analyst to discover patterns and anomalies in data by noticing unexpected relationships or by actively searching. Predictive analytics (sometimes called “data mining”) provides a powerful adjunct to this: algorithms are used to find relationships in data, and these relationships can be used with new data to “score” or “predict” results.
Predictive analytics software from ADVIZOR don’t require enterprises to purchase platforms. And, since all the data is in-memory, the Business Analyst can quickly and easily condition data and flag fields across multiple tables without having to go back to IT or a DBA to prep database tables. The interface is entirely point-and-click, there are no scripts to write. The biggest benefit from the multi-dimensional visual solution is how quickly it delivers analysis, solving critical business questions, facilitating intelligence-driven decision making, providing instant answers to “what if?” questions.
Advantages over Competitors:
• The only product in the market offering a combination of Predictive Analytics + Data Visualisation + In memory data management within one Application.
• The cost of entry is lower than the market leading data visualization vendors for desktop and server deployments.
• Advanced Visualizations like Parabox, Network Constellation in addition to normal bar charts, scatter plots, line charts, Pie charts…
• Integration with leading CRM vendors like Salesforce.com, Blackbaud, Ellucian, Information Builder
• Ability to provide sub-second response time on query against any attribute in any table, and instantaneously update all visualizations.
• Flight recorder that lets you track, replay, and save your analysis steps for reuse by yourself or others.
If you visited my blog before, you know that my classification of Data Visualization and BI vendors are different from researchers like Gartner. In addition to 3 DV Leaders – Qlikview, Tableau, Spotfire – I rarely have time to talk about other “me too” vendors.
However, sometimes products like Omniscope, Microstrategy’s Visual Insight, Microsoft BI Stack (Power View, PowerPivot, Excel 2013, SQL Server 2012, SSAS etc.), Advizor, SpreadshetWEB etc. deserve attention too. However, it takes so much time, so I am trying to find guest bloggers to cover topics like that. 7 months ago I invited volunteers to do some guest blogging about Advizor Visual Discovery Products:
So far nobody in USA or Europe committed to do so, but recently Mr. Srini Bezwada, Certified Tableau Consultant and Advizor-trained expert from Australia contacted me and submitted the article about it. He also provided me with info about how Advizor can be compared with Tableau, so I will do it briefly, using his data and opinions. Mr. Bezwada can be reached at
Below is quick comparison of Advizor with Tableau. Opinions below belong to Mr. Srini Bezwada. Next blog post will be a continuation of this article about Advizor Solutions Products, see also Advizor’s website here:
2012 was extraordinary for Data Visualization community and I expect 2013 will be even more interesting than 2012. For Data Visualization vendors 2012 was unusual YEAR and surprised many people.
We can start with Qliktech, which grew only about 18% in 2012 (while in 2011 it was 42% and in 2010 it was 44%) and QLIK stock lost a lot… Spotfire on other hand grew faster then that and Tableau grew even faster than Spotfire. Tableau doubled its workforce and its sales now more than $100M per year. Together the sales of Qlikview, Spotfire and Tableau totaled to almost $600M in 2012 and I expect it may reach even $800M in 2013. All other vendors becoming less and less visible on market. While it is still possible to have a breakthrough from companies like Microsoft, Microstrategy, Visokio and Pagos, it is highly unlikely.
If you will search in web for wishes or wishlists for Qlikview or Tableau or Spotfire, you can find plenty of wishes, including even very technical. I will partially repeat myself, because some of my best wishes are still wishes and may be some of them will be never implemented. I will restrict myself to 3 best wishes per vendor.
Let me start with Spotfire, as the most mature product. I will use analogy: EMC did spin-off VMWare and (today) market capitalization of VMWare is close $40B, about 75% (!) of Market Capitalization of its parent company EMC! I wish that TIBCO will do the same to Spotfire as EMC did to VMWare. Compare with this wish all other wishes look minimal, like making Free Spotfire Desktop Reader (similar to what Tableau has) and make part of Spotfire Silver is completely Public and Free similar to … Tableau Public.
For Qliktech I really wish them to stop bleeding capitalization-wise (did they lost $1B of MktCap during last 9 months?) and sales-wise (growing only 18% in 2012 compare with 42% in 2011). May be 2013 is good time for IBM to buy Qliktech? And yes, I wish Qlikview Server on Linux (I do not like new licensing terms of Windows 2012 Server) and I wish (for many years!) free Qlikview Desktop Viewer/Reader (similar … to Tableau Reader) in 2013 to enable server-less distribution of Qlikview-based Data Visualizations!
For Tableau I wish a very successful IPO in 2013 and I wish them to grow in 2013 as fast as they did in 2012! I really wish Tableau (and all its processes like VizQL, Application Server, Backgrounder etc.) to became 64-bit in 2013 and of course I wish Tableau Server on Linux (see my wish for Qlikview above).
Since I still have my best wishes for Microsoft (I guess they will never listen me anyway), I wish them to stop in 2013 using the dead product (Silverlight) with Power View (just complete the switch to HTML5 already), to make it completely separate from SharePoint and make it equal part of Office (integrated with PowerPivot on Desktop) the same way as Visio and Access are parts of Office and as a result I wish Microsoft to have a Power View (Data Visualization) Server (integrated with SQL Server 2012 of course) as well.
Also here are Flags of 21 countries from where this blog got most visitors in 2012:
The Admin and Server pages have been redesigned to show more info quicker. In list view the columns can be resized. In thumbnail view the grid dynamically resizes. You can hover over a thumbnail to see more info about visualization. The content search is better too:
Web authoring (even mobile) introduced by Tableau 8 Server. Change dimensions, measures, mark types, add filters, and use Show Me are all directly in a web browser and can be saved back to the server as a new workbook or if individual permissions allow, to the original workbook:
Subscribing to a workbook or worksheet will automatically notify about the dashboard or view updates to your email inbox. Subscriptions deliver image and link.
Tableau 8 Data Engine is more scalable now, it can be distributed between 2 nodes, 2nd instance of it now can be configured as Active, Synced and Available for reading if Tableau Router decided to use it (in addition Fail-over function as before)Tableau 8 Server now supports Local Rendering, using graphic ability of local devices, modern browsers and HTML5. No-round-trip to server while rendering using latest versions of chrome 23+, Firefox 17+, Safari , IE 9+. Tableau 8 (both Server and Desktop, computing each view in Parallel. PDF files, generated by Tableau 8 up to 90% smaller and searchable. And Performance Recorder works on both Server and Desktop.
Tableau 8 Server introducing Shared sessions allows more concurrency, more caching. Tableau 7 uses 1 session per viewer. Tableau 8 using one session per many viewers, as long as they do no change state of filters and don’t do other altering interaction. If interaction happened, Tableau 8 will clone the session for appropriate Interactor and apply his/her changes to new session:Finally Tableau getting API, 1st part of it I described in previous blog post about TDesktop – TDE API (C/C++, Python, Java on both Windows AND Linux!).
For Web Development Tableau has now brand new JavaScript API to customize selection, filtering, triggers to events, custom toolbar, etc. Tableau 8 has own JavaScript API WorkBench, which can be used right from you browser:
TDE API allows to build own TDE on any machine with Python, C/C++ and Java (see 24:53 at http://www.tableausoftware.com/tcc12conf/videos/new-tableau-server-8 ). Additionally Server API (REST API) allows programmatically create/enable/suspend sites and add/remove users to sites.
In addition to Faster Uploads andPublishing Data Sources, users can Publish Filters as Set and User Filters. Data Sources can be Refreshed or Appended instead of republishing – all from Local Sources. Such Refreshes can scheduled using Windows Task Scheduler or other task scheduling software on client devices – this is a real TDE proliferation!
My wishlist for Tableau 8 Server: all Tableau Server processes needs to be 64-bit (and they still 32-bit, see it here: http://onlinehelp.tableausoftware.com/v7.0/server/en-us/processes.htm ; they are way overdue to be the 64-bit; Linux version of Tableau Server (Microsoft recently changed very unfavorably the way they charge users for each Client Access) is needed, I wish integration with R Library (Spotfire has it for years), I want Backgrounder Processes (mostly doing data extracts on server) will not consume core licenses etc…
And yes, I found in San Diego even more individuals who found the better way to spend their time compare with attending Tableau 2012 Customer Conference and I am not here to judge:
I left Tableau 2012 conference in San Diego (where Tableau 8 was announced) a while ago with enthusiasm which you can feel from this real-life picture of 11 excellent announcers:
Conference was attended by 2200+ people and 600+ Tableau Software employees (Tableau almost doubled the number of employees in a year) and it felt like a great effort toward IPO (see also article here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-12/tableau-software-plans-ipo-to-drive-sales-expansion.html ). See some video here: TCC12 Keynote . Tableau 8 introduce 130+ new features, 3 times more then Tableau 7 did. Almost half of these new features are in Tableau 8 Desktop and this post about those new Desktop features (this is a repost from my Tableau Blog: http://tableau7.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/new-tableau-8-desktop-features/). New Tableau 8 Server features deserved a separate blog post which I will publish a little later after playing with Beta 1 and may be Beta 2.
A few days after conference the Tableau 8 Beta Program started with 2000+ participants. One of the most promising features is new rendering engine and I build special Tableau 7 visualization (and its port to Tableau 8) with 42000 datapoints: http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/Zips_0/Intro?:embed=y to compare the speed of rendering between versions 7 and 8:
Among new features are new (for Tableau) visualization types: Heatmap, “Packed” Bubble Chart and Word Cloud, and I build simple Tableau 8 Dashboard to test it (all 3 are visualizing the 3-dimensional set where 1 dimension used as list of items, 1 measure used for size and 2nd measure used for color of items):
List of new features includes improved Sets (comparing members vs. non-members, adding/removing members, combining Sets: all-in-both, shared-by-both, left-except-right, right-except-left), Custom SQL with parameters, Freeform Dashboards (I still prefer MDI UI where each Chart/View Sheet has own Child Window as oppose to Pane), ability to add multiple fields to Labels, optimized label placement, built-in statistical models for visual Forecasting, Visual Grouping based on your data selection, Redesigned Mark Card (for Color, Size, Label, Detail and Tooltip Shelves).
New Data features include data blending without mandatory linked field in a view and with ability to filter data in secondary data sources; refreshing server-based Data Extracts can be done from local data sources; Data Filters (in addition be either local or global) can be shared now among selected set of worksheets and dashboards. Refresh of Data Extract can be done using command prompt for Tableau Desktop, for example
Tableau 8 (both Desktop and Server) can then connect to this extract file natively! Tableau provides new native connection for Google Analytics and Saleforce.com. TDE files now much smaller (especially with text values) – up to 40% smaller compare with Tableau 7.
Tableau 8 has performance enhancements, such as the new ability to use hardware accelerators (of modern graphics cards), computing views within dashboard in parallel (in Tableau 7 it was consecutive computations) and new performance recorder allows to estimate and tune a workload of various activities and functions and optimize the behavior of workbook.
I still have a wishlist of features which are not implemented in Tableau and I hope some them will be implemented later: all Tableau processes are 32-bit (except 64-bit version of data engine for server running on 64-bit OS) and they are way overdue to be the 64-bit; many users demand MAC version of Tableau Desktop and Linux version of Tableau Server (Microsoft recently changed very unfavorably the way they charge users for each Client Access), I wish MDI UI for Dashboards where each view of each worksheet has own Window as oppose to own pane (Qlikview does it from the beginning of the time), I wish integration with R Library (Spotfire has it for years), scripting languages and IDE (preferably Visual Studio), I want Backgrounder Processes (mostly doing data extracts on server) will not consume core licenses etc…
Despite the great success of the conference, I found somebody in San Diego who did not pay attention to it (outside was 88F, sunny and beautiful):
On May 3rd of 2012 the Google+ extension http://tinyurl.com/VisibleData of this Data Visualization blog reached 500+ followers, on July 9 it got 1000+ users, on October 11 it had already 2000+ users, 11/27/12 my G+ Data Visualization Page has 2190+ followers and still growing every day (updated as of 12/01/12: 2500+ followers.
One of reasons of course is just a popularity of Data Visualization related topics and other reason covered in interesting article here:
In any case, it helped me to create a reading list for myself and other people, base on feedback I got. According to CicleCount, as of 11/13/12 update, my Data Visualization Google+ Page ranked as #178 most popular page in USA. Thank you G+ ! Updates:
5/25/13: G+ extension of this blog now has 3873+ followers, and as of 7/15/13 as of 4277+ followers), and as of 11/11/13 it has 5013+ followers:
Qlikview 10 was released around 10/10/10, Qlikview 11 – around 11/11/11, so I expected Qlikview 12 to be released on 12/12/12 but “instead” we are getting Qlikview 11.2 with Direct Discovery in December 2012, which supposedly provides a “hybrid approach so business users can get the QlikView associative experience even with data that is not stored in memory”
Just 8 months ago Qliktech estimated its sales for 2012 as $410M and suddenly 3 months ago it changed its estimates down to $381M, just 19% over 2011, which is in huge contrast with Qliktech’s previous speed of growth and way behind the current speed of growth of Tableau and even less then current speed of growth of Spotfire. During last 2 years QLIK stock unable to grow significantly:
and all of the above forcing Qliktech to do something outside of gradual improvements – new and exciting functionality needed and Direct Discovery may help!
QlikView Direct Discovery enables users to perform visual analysis against “any amount of data, regardless of size”. With the introduction of this unique hybrid approach, users can associate data stored within big data sources directly alongside additional data sources stored within the QlikView in-memory model. QlikView can “seamlessly connect to multiple data sources together within the same interface”, e.g. Teradata to SAP to Facebook allowing the business user to associate data across the data silos. Data outside of RAM can be joined with the in-memory data with the common field names. This allows the user associatively navigate both on the direct discovery and in memory data sets.
QlikView developer should setup the Direct Discovery table on the QlikView application load script to allow the business users to query the desired big data source. Within the script editor a new syntax is introduced to connect to data in direct discovery form. Traditionally the following syntax is required to load data from a database table:
To invoke the direct discovery method, the keyword “SQL” is replaced with “DIRECT”.
In the example above only column CarrierTrackingNumber and ProductID are loaded into QlikView in the traditional manner, other columns exist in the data table within the Database including columns OrderQty and Price. OrderQty and Price fields are referred as “IMPLICIT” fields. An implicit field is a field that QlikView is aware of on a “meta level”. The actual data of an implicit field resides only in the database but the field may be used in QlikView expressions. Looking at the table view and data model of the direct discovery columns are not within the model (on the OrderFact table):
Once the direct discovery structure is established, the direct discovery data can be joined with the in-memory data with the common field names (Figure 3). In this example, “ProductDescription” table is loaded in-memory and joined to direct discovery data with the ProductID field. This allows the user to associatively navigate both on the “direct discovery” and in memory data sets.
Direct Discovery will be much slow then in-memory processing and this is is expected, but it will take away from Qlikview its usual claim that is is faster then competitors. QlikView Direct Discovery can only be used against SQL compliant data sources. The following data sources are supported;
• ODBC/OLEDB data sources – All ODBC/OLEDB sources are supported, including SQL Server, Teradata and Oracle.
• Custom connectors which support SQL – Salesforce.com, SAP SQL Connector, Custom QVX connectors for SQL compliant data stores.
Due to the interactive and SQL syntax specific nature of the Direct Discovery approaches a number of limitations exist. The following chart types are not supported;
• Pivot tables
• Mini charts
And the following QlikView features are not supported:
• Advanced aggregation
• Calculated dimensions
• Comparative Analysis (Alternate State) on the QlikView objects that use Direct
Discovery fields
• Direct Discovery fields are not supported on Global Search
• Binary load from a QlikView application with Direct Discovery table
Here is a some preliminary video about Direct Discovery, published by Qliktech:
It was interesting to me that just 2 days after Qliktech pre-anounced Direct Discovery it also partners with Teradata. Tableau partners with Teradata for a while and Spotfire did it a month ago, so I guess Qliktech trying to catchup in this regard as well. I mentioned it only to underscore the point of this blog post: Qliktech realized that it behind its competitors in some areas and it has to follow ASAP.
Today TIBCO announced Spotfire 5, which will be released in November 2012. Two biggest news are the access to SQL Server Analysis Services cubes and the integration with Teradata “by pushing all aggregations, filtering and complex calculations used for interactive visualization into the (Teradata) database”.
Spotfire team “rewrote” its in-memory engine for v. 5.0 to take advantage of high-capacity, multi-core servers. “Spotfire 5 is capable of handling in-memory data volumes orders of magnitude greater than the previous version of the Spotfire analytics platform” said Lars Bauerle, vice president of product strategy at TIBCO Spotfire.
Another addition is “in-database analysis” which allows to apply analytics within the database platforms (such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Teradata) without extracting and moving data, while handling analyses on Spotfire server and returning result sets back to the database platform.
Spotfire added new Tibco Enterprise Runtime for R, which embeds R runtime engine into the Spotfire statistical server. TIBCO claims that Spotfire 5.0 scales to tens of thousands of users! Spotfire 5 is designed to leverage the full family of TIBCO business optimization and big data solutions, including TIBCO LogLogic®, TIBCO Silver Fabric, TIBCO Silver® Mobile, TIBCOBusinessEvents®, tibbr® and TIBCO ActiveSpaces®.
and they invited me to be a Speaker and Panelist together with Irene Greif (Fellow @IBM) and Martin Leach (CIO @Broad Institute). Most interesting about this event was that it was sold out and about 150 people came to participate, even it was most productive time of the day (from 8:30am until 10:30am). Compare with what I observed just a few years ago, I sensed the huge interest to Data Visualization, base on multiple, very interesting and relevant questions I got from event participants.
I doubt that Microsoft is paying attention to my blog, but recently they declared that Power View now has 2 versions: one for SharePoint (thanks, but no thanks) and one for Excel 2013. In other words, Microsoft decided to have own Desktop Visualization tool. In combination with PowerPivot and SQL Server 2012 it can be attractive for some Microsoft-oriented users but I doubt it can compete with Data Visualization Leaders – too late.
Most interesting is the note about Power View 2013 on Microsoft site: “Power View reports in SharePoint are RDLX files. In Excel, Power View sheets are part of an Excel XLSX workbook. You can’t open a Power View RDLX file in Excel, and vice versa. You also can’t copy charts or other visualizations from the RDLX file into the Excel workbook.“
But most amazing is that Microsoft decided to use the dead Silverlight for Powerview: “Both versions of Power View need Silverlight installed on the machine.” And we know that Microsoft switched to HTML5 from Silverlight and no new development planned for Silverlight! Good luck with that…
And yes, you can add now maps (Bing of course), see it here:
I used LinkedIn for years to measure of how many people mentioning Data Visualization tools on their profiles, of how many LinkedIn groups dedicated to those DV tools and what group membership is. Recently these statistics show dramatic changes in favor of Qlikview and Tableau as undisputed leaders in people’s opinions.
Here is how many people mentioned specific tools (statistics were updated on 9/4/12 and numbers changing every day) on their profiles:
I feel guilty for many months now: I literally do not have time for project I wish to do for a while: to compare Advizor Analyst and other Visual Discovery products from Advizor Solutions, Inc. with leading Data Visualization products like Tableau or Qlikview. I am asking visitors of my blog to volunteer and be a guest blogger here; the only pre-condition here is: a guest blogger must be the Expert in Advizor Solutions products and equally so in on of these 3: Tableau, Qlikview or Spotfire.
ADVIZOR’s Visual Discovery™ software is built upon strong data visualization technology spun out of a research heritage at Bell Labs that spans nearly two decades and produced over 20 patents. Formed in 2003, ADVIZOR has succeeded in combining its world-leading data visualization and in-memory-data-management expertise with predictive analytics to produce an easy to use, point and click product suite for business analysis.
If you think that Advizor can compete with Data Visualization leaders and you have interesting comparison of it, please send it to me as MS-Word article and I will publish it here as a guest blog post. Thank you in advance…
Big Data can be useless without multi-layer data aggregations, hierarchical or cube-like intermediary Data Structures, when ONLY a few dozens, hundreds or thousands data-points exposed visually and dynamically every single viewing moment to analytical eyes for interactive drill-down-or-up hunting for business value(s) and actionable datum (or “datums” – if plural means data). One of best expression of this concept (at least how I interpreted it) I heard from my new colleague who flatly said:
“Move the function to the data!”
I got recently involved with multiple projects using large data-sets for Tableau-based Data Visualizations (100+ millions of rows and even Billions of records!). Some of largest examples of their sizes I used were: 800+ millions of records and other was 2+ billions of rows.
So this blog post is to express my thoughts about such Big Data (in average examples above have about 1+ KB per CSV record before compression and other advanced DB tricks, like columnar Databases used by Data Engine of Tableau) as back-end for Tableau. But please keep in mind that as a 32-bit tool, Tableau itself is not ready for Big Data. In addition, I think Big Data is mostly a buzzword and BS and we are forced by marketing BS masters to use sometimes this stupid term.
Here are some Factors involved into Data Delivery from main and designated Database (Back-ends like Teradata, DB2, SQL Server or Oracle) for Tableau-based Big Data Visualizations) into “local” Tableau Visualizations (many people still trying to use Tableau as a Reporting tool as oppose to (Visual) Analytical Tool:
Queuing thousands of Queries to Database Server. There is no guarantee your Tableau query will be executed immediately; in fact it WILL be delayed.
Speed of Tableau Query when it will start to be executed depends on sharing CPU cycles, RAM and other resources with other queries executed SIMULTANEOSLY with your query.
Buffers, pools and other resources available for particular user(s) and queries at your Database Server are different and depends on privileges and settings given to you as a Database User
Network speed: between some servers it can be 10Gbits (or even more), in most cases it is 1Gbit inside server rooms, outside of server rooms I observed in many old buildings (over wired Ethernet) max 100Mbits coming into user’s PC; in case if you using Wi-Fi it can be even less (say 54 Mbits?). If you are using internet it can be even less (I observed speed in some remote offices as 1 Mbit or so over old T-1 lines); if you using VPN it will max out at 4Mbits or less (I observed it in my home office).
Utilization of network. I use Remote Desktop Protocol – RDP to VM (from my workstation or notebook; (VM or VDI Virtual Machine, sitting in server room) and connected to servers with network speed of 1Gbit, but it still using maximum 3% of network speed (about 30 MBits, which is about 3 Megabytes of data per second, which is probably about few thousands of records per seconds.
That means that network may have a problem to deliver 100 millions of records to “local” report overnight (say 10 hours, 10 millions of records per hour, 3000 records per second) – partially and probably because of factors 4 above.
On top of those factors please keep in mind that Tableau is a set of 32-bit applications (with exception of one out of 7 processes on Server side), which is restricted to 2GB of RAM; if data-set cannot fit into RAM, than Tableau Data Engine will use the disk as Virtual RAM, which is much, much slower and for some users such disk space actually not local to his/her workstation and mapped to some “remote” network file server.
Tableau desktop is using in many cases 32-bit ODBC drivers, which may even add more delay into data delivery into local “Visual Report”. As we learned from Tableau support itself, even with latest Tableau Server 7.0.X, the RAM allocated for one user session restricted to 3GB anyway.
Unfortunate Update: Tableau 8.0 will be 32-bit application again, but may be follow up version 8.x or 9 (I hope) will be ported to 64-bits… It means that Spotfire, Qlikview and even PowerPivot will keep some advantages over Tableau for a while…
Often I used small Tableau (or Spotfire or Qlikview) workbooks instead of PowerPoint, which are proving at least 2 concepts:
Good Data Visualization tool can be used as the Web or Desktop Container for Multiple Data Visualizations (it can be used to build a hierarchical Container Structures with more then 3 levels; currently 3: Container-Workbooks-Views)
TIBCO said Spotfire 4.5 will be available later this month (May 2012).
Among news and additions to Spotfire: it will include ADS connector to Hadoop, integration with SAS, Mathworks and Attivio engines and new deployment kit for iPad.
named “The future of BI in two words” which made me feel warm and fuzzy about both products and unclear about what Ted’s judgement is?
Fortunately I had a more “digitized” comparison of these 2 Data Visualization Leaders, which I did a while ago for a different reason. So I modified it a little to bring it up-to-date and you can see it for yourself below. Funny thing is that even I used 30+ criterias to measure and compare those two brilliant products, final score is almost identical for both of them, so it is still warm and fuzzy.
Basically conclusion is simple: each product is better for certain customers and for certain projects, there is no universal answer (yet?):
The short version of this post: as far as Data Visualization is a concern, the new Power View from Microsoft is the marketing disaster, the architectural mistake and the generous gift from Microsoft to Tableau, Qlikview, Spotfire and dozens of other vendors.
For the long version – keep reading.
Assume for a minute (OK, just for a second) that new Power View Data Visualization tool from Microsoft SQL Server 2012 is almost as good as Tableau Desktop 7. Now let’s compare installation, configuration and hardware involved:
Tableau:
Hardware: almost any modern Windows PC/notebook (at least dual-core, 4GB RAM).
Installation: a) one 65MB setup file, b) minimum or no skills
Configuration: 5 minutes – follow instructions on screen during installation.
Price – $2K.
Power View:
Hardware: you need at least 2 server-level PCs (each at least quad-core, 16GB RAM recommended). I will not recommend to use 1 production server to host both SQL Server and SharePoint; if you desperate, at least use VM(s).
Configurations: Hours or days plus a lot of reading, previous knowledge etc.
Price: $20K or if only for development it is about $5K (Visual Studio with MSDN subscription) plus cost of skilled labor.
As you can see, Power View simply cannot compete on mass market with Tableau (and Qlikview and Spotfire) and time for our assumption in the beginning of this post is expired. Instead now is time to remind that Power View is 2 generations behind Tableau, Qlikview and Spotfire. And there is no Desktop version of Power View, it is only available as a web application through web browser.
Power View is a Silverlight application packaged by Microsoft as a SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition. Power View is (ad-hoc) report designer providing for user an interactive data exploration, visualization, and presentation web experience. Microsoft stopped developing Silverlight in favor of HTML5, but Silverlight survived (another mistake) within SQL Server team.
Previous report designers (still available from Microsoft: BIDS, Report Builder 1.0, Report Builder 3.0, Visual Studio Report Designer) are capable to produce only static reports, but Power View enables users to visually interact with data and drill-down all charts and Dashboard similar to Tableau and Qlikview.
Power View is a Data Visualization tool, integrated with Microsoft ecosystem. Here is a Demo of how the famous Hans Rosling Data Visualization can be reimplemented with Power View:
Compare with previous report builders from Microsoft, Power View allows many new features, like Multiple Views in a Single Report, Gallery preview of Chart Images, export to PowerPoint, Sorting within Charts by measures and Categories, Multiple Measures in Charts, Highlighting of selected data in reports and Charts, Synchronization of Slicers (Cross-Filtering), Measure Filters, Search in Filters (convenient for a long lists of categories), dragging data fields into Canvas (create table) or Charts (modify visualization), convert measures to categories (“Do Not Summarize”), and many other features.
Power View is not the 1st attempt to be a full player in Data Visualization and BI Market. Previous attempts failed and can be counted as Strikes.
Strike 1: The ProClarity acquisition in 2006 failed, there have been no new releases since v. 6.3; remnants of ProClarity can be found embedded into SharePoint, but there is no Desktop Product anymore.
Strike 2: Performance Point Server was introduced in November, 2007, and discontinued two years later. Remnants of Performance Point can be found embedded into SharePoint as Performance Point Services.
Both failed attempts were focused on the growing Data Visualization and BI space, specifically at fast growing competitors such as Qliktech, Spotfire and Tableau. Their remnants in SharePoint functionally are very behind of Data Visualization leaders.
Path to Strike 3 started in 2010 with release of PowerPivot (very successful half-step, since it is just a backend for Visualization) and xVelocity (originally released under name VertiPaq). Power View is continuation of these efforts to add a front-end to Microsoft BI stack. I do not expect that Power View will gain as much popularity as Qlikview and Tableau and in my mind Microsoft will be a subject of 3rd strike in Data Visualization space.
One reason I described in very beginning of this post and the 2nd reason is absence of Power View on desktop. It is a mystery for me why Microsoft did not implement Power View as a new part of Office (like Visio, which is a great success) – as a new desktop application, or as a new Excel Add-In (like PowerPivot) or as a new functionality in PowerPivot or even as a new functionality in Excel itself, or as new version of their Report Builder. None of these options preventing to have a Web reincarnation of it and such reincarnation can be done as a part of (native SSRS) Reporting Services – why involve SharePoint (which is – and I said it many times on this blog – basically a virus)?
I am wondering what Donald Farmer thinking about Power View after being the part of Qliktech team for a while. From my point of view the Power View is a generous gift and true relief to Data Visualization Vendors, because they do not need to compete with Microsoft for a few more years or may be forever. Now IPO of Qliktech making even more sense for me and upcoming IPO of Tableau making much more sense for me too.
Yes, Power View means new business for consulting companies and Microsoft partners (because many client companies and their IT departments cannot handle it properly), Power View has a good functionality but it will be counted in history as a Strike 3.
I was always intrigued with colors and their usage, since my mom told me that may be ( just may be, there is no direct prove of it anyway) Ancient Greeks did not know what the BLUE color is – that puzzled me.
Later in my live, I realized that Colors and Palettes are playing the huge role in Data Visualization (DV) and it eventually led me to attempt to understand of how it can be used and pre-configured in advanced DV tools to make Data more Visible and to express the Data Patterns better. For this post I used Tableau to produce some palettes, but similar technique can be found in Qlikview, Spotfire etc.
For the first, regular Red-Yellow-Green-Blue Palette with known colors with well-established names, I created even a Visualization in order to compare their Red-Green-Blue components and I even tried to placed respective Bubbles on 2-dimensional surface, even originally it is clearly a 3 dimensional Dataset (click on image to see it in full size):
For the 2nd Red-Yellow-Green-NoBlue Ordered Sequential Palette, I tried to implement the extended “Set of Traffic Lights without any trace of BLUE Color” (so Homer and Socrates will understand it the same way as we are) while trying to use only web-safe colors. Please keep in mind, that Tableau does not have a simple way to have more than 20 colors in one Palette, like Spotfire does.
Other 5 Palettes below are useful too as ordered-diverging almost “mono-chromatic” (except Red-Green Diverging, since it can be used in Scorecards when Red is bad and Green is good). So see below Preferences.tps file with my 7 custom palettes.
(this is a repost from http://tableau7.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/tableau-reader/ )
Tableau made a couple of brilliant decisions to completely outsmart its competitors and gained extreme popularity, while convincing millions of potential, future and current customers to invest own time to learn Tableau. 1st reason of course is Tableau Public (we discuss it in separate blog post) and other is a Free Tableau Reader (released in 2008), which provides full desktop user experience and interactive Data Visualization without any Tableau Server (and any other server) involved and with better performance and UI then Server-based Visualizations.
While designing Data Visualizations is done with Tableau Desktop, most users got their Data Visualizations served by Tableau Server to their Web Browser. However in the large and small organizations that usage pattern is not always the best fit. Below I am discussing a few possible use cases, where the usage of Free Tableau Reader can be appropriate, see it here: http://www.tableausoftware.com/products/reader .
1. Tableau Application Server serves Visualizations well, but not as well as Tableau Reader, because Tableau Reader delivers a truly desktop User Experience and UI. Most known example of it is a Motion Chart: you can see automatic motion with Tableau Reader but Web Browser will force user to manually emulate motion. In cases like that user advised to download workbook, copy .TWBX file to his/her workstation and open it with Tableau Reader.
Here is an example of the Motion Chart, done in Tableau, similar to famous Hans Rosling’s presentation of Gapminder’s Motion Chart (an you need the free Tableau Reader or license to Tableau Desktop to see the automatic motion of the 6-dimensional dataset with all colored bubbles, resizing over time): http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/MotionChart_0/Motion?:embed=y
2. When you have hundreds or thousands of Tableau Server users and more then couple of Admins (users with Administrative privileges), each of Admins can override viewing privileges for any workbook, regardless of designated for that workbook Users and User Groups. In such situation there is a risk for violation of privacy and confidentiality of data involved, for example for HR Analytics and HR Dashboards and other Visualizations where private, personal and confidential data used.
Tableau Reader enables additional complementary method of delivering Data Visualizations through private channels like password-protected portals, file servers and FTP servers and in certain cases even by-passing Tableau Server entirely.
3. Due popularity of Tableau and ease of use, many groups and teams are considering Tableau as vehicle to delivering of hundreds and even thousands of Visual Reports to hundreds and may be even thousands of users. That can slow down Tableau Server, decrease user experience and create even more confidentiality problems, because it may expose confidential data to unintended users, like report for one store to users from another store.
4. Many small (and not so small either) organizations trying to save on Tableau Server licenses (at least initially) and they still can distribute Tableau-based Data Visualizations; developer(s) will have Tableau Desktop (relatively small investment) and users, clients and customers will use Tableau Reader, while all TWBX files can be distributed over FTP, portals or file servers or even by email. In my experience, when Tableau-based business will grow enough, it will pay by itself for buying licenses for Tableau Server, so usage of Tableau Reader in n o way is threat to Tbaleau Software bottom line!
Update (12/12/12) for even more happy usage of Tableau Reader: in upcoming Tableau 8 all Tableau Data Extracts – TDEs – can be created and used without any Tableau Server involved. Instead Developer can create/update TDE either with Tableau in UI mode or using Tableau Command Line Interface and script TDEs in batch mode or programmatically with new TDE API (Python, C/C++, Java). It means that Tableau workbooks can be automatically refreshed with new data without any Tableau Server and re-delivered to Tableau Reader users over … FTP, portals or file servers or even by email.
In unusual, interesting (what it means? is it promising or what?) move the two Data Visualization leaders (Panopticon and Qliktech) partners today, see
Panopticon’s press-release looks overly submissive to me:
“As a member of QlikTech’s Qonnect Partner Program for Technology Partners, Panopticon supports QlikView desktop, web, and mobile interactive dashboards and allows users to filter and interact directly with real-time data. By integrating Panopticon into their systems, QlikView users can:
The combined Panopticon-QlikView platform is now available for immediate installation.”
Panopticon integration into QlikView dashboards utilizes QlikView UI extension objects within the web browser. The extension object calls Panopticon “web parts” and creates a Panopticon extension object with a number of pre-defined properties. The defined context/data is passed into the Panopticon extension object. The Panopticon “web parts” call a Panopticon EX Java applet and renders the requested Panopticon visualization workbook within the context defined by the QlikView user. The Panopticon component executes parameterized URL calls and parameterized JavaScripts to update the parent QlikView display.
Qliktech is trying to be politically correct and its Michael Saliter, Senior Director Global Market Development – Financial Services at QlikTech said, “Our partnership with Panopticon allows us to incorporate leading real-time visualization capabilities into our QlikView implementations. We recognize the importance of providing our clients with truly up-to-date information, and this new approach supports that initiative. Our teams share a common philosophy about proper data visualization design. This made it easy to develop a unified approach to the presentation of real-time, time series, and static data in ways that people can understand in seconds.”
While I like when competitors are cooperating (it benefits users and hopefully improve sales for both vendors), I still have a question: Qliktech got a lot of money from IPO, had a lot of sales and hired a lot of people lately; why they (Qlikview Developers) was not able to develop real-time functionality themselves?
Hugh Heinsohn, VP of Panopticon, said to me: “we (Panopticon) don’t see ourselves as competitors – and neither do they (Qliktech). When you get into the details, we do different things and we’re working together closely now”
Another indirect sign of relationship between Panopticon and Qliktech is the recent inclusion of Måns Hultman, former CEO of QlikTech into the list of advisors for Panopticon’s Board of Directors.
Other questions are rising too: if Qliktech suddenly is open to integration with Panopticon, why not to integrate with Quantrix and R Library (I proposed integration with R a while ago). Similar questions applicable to Tableau Software…
I was silent for a while for a reason: I owe myself to read a big pile of books, articles and blog posts by many authors – I have to read it before I can write something myself. List is huge and it goes many weeks back! I will sample a sublist here with some relatively fresh reading materials in no particular order:
1. Excellent “Clearly and Simply” blog by Robert Mundigl, here are just 2 samples:
10. Huge set of articles from variety of Sources about newly released or about to be released xVelocity, PowerPivot2, SQL Server 2012, SSDT (SQl Server Data Tools), VS11 etc.
11. Here is a sample of article with which I disagree (I think OBIEE is TWO generations behind of Qlikview, Tableau and Spotfire), but still need to read it:
this list is go on and on and on, so answer on my own question is: to read!
Below is a prove (unrelated to Data Visualization, but cannot resist to publishing it – I did the spreadsheet below by myself) – rather for myself, that reading can help to avoid mistakes (sounds funny, I know). For example if you will listen last week’s iPropaganda from iChurch, you will think that new iPad 2012 is the best tablet on market. But if you read carefully specification of new iPad 2012 and compare it (after careful reading) with specifications of new Asus Transformer Pad Infinity, you will have a different choice:
“Scott Sandell, a partner with New Enterprise Associates (the venture capital firm that is Tableau’s largest outside shareholder) told Dan “that the “board-level discussions” are about taking the company public next year, even though it has the numbers to go out now if it so chose. Sandell added that the company has been very efficient with $15 million or so it has raised in VC funding, and that it shouldn’t need additional pre-IPO financing”.
Mr. Primack also mentioned an “unsolicited email, from outside spokesman: “Next week Tableau Software will announce its plans to go IPO“…
I do not have comments, but I will not be surprised if somebody will buy Tableau before IPO… Among potential buyers I can imagine:
Microsoft (Seattle, Multidimensional Cubes, integration with Excel),
Teradata (Aster Data is in, front-end for “big data” is needed),
IBM (if you cannot win against the innovator, how about buying it),
and even Oracle (everything moving is the target?)…
Qliktech made its price list public on its website. In a move that calls for “other enterprise software and business intelligence vendors to follow suit, QlikTech is taking the mystery out of purchasing software“.
I expanded this post with comments and comparison of pricing from Qlikview and Tableau.
I have to mention that Tableau has pricing on its website for years. I wish Tableau will publish on its website the pricing for Core License (for Tableau Server) and more detail for Tableau Digital and Server pricing, but other than that, Tableau is a few years ahead of Qliktech in terms of “pricing transparency”… Also talking with Qliktech sales people until today was more time consuming then needed and I hope that public pricing will make it more easy.
One note about Qlikview pricing: Qliktech has a very weird requirement to buy a Document License ($350 per named user, per 1 (ONE) document) for each document is a potential time-bomb for Qlikview. But they are very good at sales (Total Q4 2011 revenue of $108.1 million increases 33% compared to fourth quarter of 2010, see http://investor.qlikview.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1193125-12-65355&CIK=1305294) and not me, so I will be glad if Qliktech will prove me wrong!
I tried to compare the cost of average Deployment for Qlikview-based and Tableau-based Data Visualization Systems using currently Published prices of Qlikview and Tableau (I actually have an estimation for Spotfire-based deployment too, but TIBCO did not published its pricing yet). See prices in table below, and comparison of average deploymnet after/below this table:
I took as average the deployment with 46 users (it is my estimate of average Qlikview Deployment), 3 desktop clients, 10 documents/visualizations available to 10 (potentially different) named users each, 1 Application Server and maintenance for 3 years.
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My estimate of total cost for 3 years came up as about $118K for Qlikview Deployment and $83K for Tableau Deployment (both before discounts and taxes and both do not include any development, training, consulting and IT cost).
Note 3/8/12: you may wish to review this blog post too:
Since Gartner keeps doing its “Magic Quadrant” (MQ; see MQ at the very bottom of this post) for Business Intelligence Platforms every year, it forces me to do my
“Yellow Square for DV, 2012”
for Data Visualization (DV) Platforms too. I did it last year and I have to do it again because I disagreed with Gartner in 2011 and I disagree with it again in 2012. I have a few different (from Gartner) views, but I will mention 3.
1. There is no such thing as Business Intelligence as a software platform. It is a marketing term, used as an umbrella for multiple technologies and market segments. Gartner released its MQ for BI at the same time it had “BI Summit 2012” in London on which it practically acknowledged that BI is not a correct term and suggested to use the term “Business Analytics” instead, see for example this article: http://timoelliott.com/blog/2012/02/what-i-found-interesting-about-gartner-bi-summit-2012-london.html
2. I personally is using – for many years – the term Data Visualization as a replacement for BI, as much more specific. Because of that, I removed from consideration a few vendors present in Gartner’s MQ for BI and added a few important DV vendors.
3. I used for my assessment 3 groups of criterias, which I already used on this blog before, for example here:
As a result, I got a very different from Gartner the placement of “Data Visualization Platforms and their vendors”:
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For reference purposes please see below the Magic Quadrant for BI, published by Gartner this month. As you can see our lists of Vendors are overlapping by 11 companies, but in my opinion their relative positioning is very different:
Internet has a lot of articles, pages, blogs, data, demos, vendors, sites, dashboards, charts, tools and other materials related to Data Visualization and this Google+ page will try to point to most relevant items and sometimes to comment on most interesting of them.
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What was unexpected is a fast success of this Google+ page – in a very short time it got 200+ followers and that number keeps growing!
New version 3.3 of SpreadsheetWEB with new features like Data Consolidation, User Groups, Advance Analytics and Interactive Charts, is released this month by Cambridge, MA-based Pagos, Inc.
SpreadsheetWEB is known as the best SaaS platform with unique ability to convert Excel spreadsheets to rich web applications with live database connections, integration with SQL Server, support for 336 Excel functions (see full list here http://wiki.pagos.com/display/spreadsheetweb/Supported+Excel+Formulas ), multiple worksheets, Microsoft Drawing, integration with websites and the best Data Collection functionality among BI tools and platforms.
SpreadsheetWEB supports Scripting (Javascript), has own HTML editor, has rich Data Visualization and Dashboarding functionality (32 interactive Chart types are supported, see http://spreadsheetweb.com/support_charts.htm ),
See the simple Video Tutorial about how to create a Web Dashboard with Interactive Charts by publishing your Excel Spreadsheet using SpreadsheetWEB 3.3 here:
SpreadsheetWEB supports Mapping for a while, see video showing how you can create Map application in less then 4 minutes:
In order to create a SpreadsheetWEB application, all you need is Excel and free SpreadsheetWEB Add-in for Excel, see many impressive online Demos here: http://spreadsheetweb.com/demo.htm
2011 was the Year of Tableau with almost 100% (again!) Year-over-Year growth ($72M in sales in 2011, see interview with Christian Chabot here: http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2012/01/27/tableaus-10th-year/ ), with 163+ new employees (total 350 employees as of the end of 2011) – below is the column chart I found on Tableau’s website:
and with tremendous popularity of Tableau Public and Tableau Free Desktop Reader. In January 2012 Tableau Software disclosed the new plan to hire 300 more people in 2012, basically doubling its size in 2012 and all of these are great news!
Tableau 7.0 is released in January 2012 with 40+ new cool features, I like them, but I wish 4+ more “features”. Mostly I am puzzled what wizards from Seattle are thinking when they released (in 2012!) their Professional Desktop Client only as a 32-bit program?
Most interesting for me is the doubling of the performance and the scalability of Tableau Server with 100+ users deployments (while adding multi-tenancy, which is the sign of the maturing toward large enterprise customers):
and adding “Data Server” features, like sharing data extracts (Tableau-optimized DB-independent file containers for datasets) and metadata across visualizations (Tableau applications called workbooks), automatic (through proxies) live reconnection to datasources, support for new datasources like Hadoop (since 6.1.4) and Vectorwise and new “Connect to Data” Tab:
Tableau’s target operating system is Windows 7 (both 64-bit and 32-bit but for Data Visualization purposes 64-bit is the most important), Tableau rightfully claims to complement Excel 2010 and PowerPivot (64-bit again), Access 2010 (64-bit), SQL Server 2012 (64-bit) and their competitors are supporting 64-bit for a while (e.g. Qlikview Professional has both 64-bit and 32-bit client for years).
Even Tableau’s own in-memory Data Engine (required to be used with Tableau Professional) is the 64-bit executable (if running under 64-bit Windows). I am confused and hope that Tableau will have 64-bit client as soon as possible (what is a big deal here? don’t explain, don’t justify, just do it! On Tableau site you can find attempts to explain/justify, like this: “There is no benefit to Tableau supporting 64-bit for our processing. The amount of data that is useful to display is well within the reach of 32 bit systems” but it was not my (Andrei’s) experience with competitive tools). I also noticed that under 64-bit Windows 7 the Tableau Professional client is using at least 4 executables: 32-bit tableau.exe (main Tableau program), 64-bit tdeserver64.exe (Tableau Data Engine) and two 32-bit instances of Tableau Protocol Server (tabprotosrv.exe ) – looks strange (at least) to me…
You also can find on Tableau’s site users are reporting that Tableau 6.X underuses multi-core processors: “Tableau isn’t really exploiting the capabilities of a multi-core architecture, so speed was more determined by relative speeds of one core of a core 2 duo vs 1 core of an i7 – which weren’t that different, plus any differences in disk and memory speed“. Good news: I tested Tableau 7.0 and it uses multi-core CPUs much better then 6.X !
Of course, most appealing and sexy new features in Tableau 7.0 are related to mapping. For example I was able quickly create Filled Map, showing the income differences between states of USA:
Other mapping features include wrapped maps, more synonyms and mixed mark types on maps (e.g. PIE instead of BUBBLE), the ability to edit locations and add new locationsas well as using Geography as Mark(s), like I did below:
Tableau added many analytical and convenience features for users, like parameter-based Ref.lines, Top N filtering and Bins, Enhanced Summary Statistics (e.g. median, deviation, quartiles, kurtosis and skewness are added):
Trend models are greatly improved (added t-value, p-value, confidence bands, exponential trends, exporting of trends etc.). Tableau 7.0 has now 1-click and dynamic sorting, much better support for tooltips and colors.
I hope Tableau will implement my other 3+ wishes (in addition to my wish to have 64-bit Tableau Professional “client”) and will release API, will support the scripting (Python, JavaScript, VBScript, PowerShell, whatever) and will integrate with R Library as well.
On Friday July 8, 2011, the closing price of Qliktech’s share (symbol QLIK) was $35.43. Yesterday January 6, 2012, QLIK closed with price $23.21. If you consider yesterday’s price as 100% than QLIK (blue line below) lost 52% of value in just 6 months, while Dow Jones (red line below) basically lost only 2-3% :
Since Qliktech’s Market Capitalization as of yesterday evening was about $1.94B, it means that Qliktech lost in last 6 month about 1 billion dollars in capitalization! That is a sad observation to make and made me wonder why it happened?
I see nothing wrong with Qlikview software, in fact everybody knows (and this blog is the prove for it) that I like Qlikview very much.
So I tried to guess for reasons (for that lost) below, but it just my guesses and I will be glad if somebody will prove me mistaken and explain to me the behavior of QLIK stock during last 6 months…
2011 supposed to be the year of Qliktech: it had successful IPO in 2010, it doubled the size of its workforce (I estimate it has more than 1000 employees by end of 2011), it sales grew almost 40% in 2011, it kept updating Qlikview and it generated a lot of interest to it’s products and to Data Visualization market. In fact Qlliktech dominated its market and its marketshare is about 50% (of Data Visualization market).
So I will list below my guesses about factors which influenced QLIK stock and I do not think it was only one or 2 major factors but rather a combination of them (I may guess wrong or miss some possible reasons, please correct me):
P/E Ratio (price-to-earnings) for QLIK is 293 (and it was even higher), which may indicate that stock is overvalued and investors expectations are too high.
Company insiders (Directors and Officers) were very active lately selling their shares, which may affected the prices of QLIK shares.
56% of Qliktech’s sales are coming from Europe and European market is not growing lately.
58% of Qliktech’s sales are coming from existing customers and it can limit the speed of growth.
Most new hires after IPO were sales, pre-sales, marketing and other non-R&D types.
Qliktech’s offices are too diversified for its size (PA, MA, Sweden etc.) and what is especially unhealthy (from my view) is that R&D resides mostly in Europe while Headquarters, marketing and other major departments reside far from R&D – in USA (mostly in Radnor, PA)
2011 turned to be a year of Tableau (as oppose to my expectation to be a year of Qlikview) and Tableau is winning the battle for mindshare with its Tableau Public web service and its free Desktop Tableau Reader, which allows to distribute Data Visualizations without any Web/Application Servers and IT personnel to be involved. Tableau is growing much faster then Qliktech and it generates a huge momentum, especially in USA, where Tableau’s R&D,QA, Sales, Marketing and Support all co-reside in Seattle, WA.
Tableau has the best support for Data Sources; for example, which is important due soon to be released SQL Server 2012, Tableau has the unique ability to read Multidimensional OLAP Cubes from SQL Server Analysis Services and from local Multidimensional Cubes from PowerPivot. Qlikview so far ignored Multidimensional Cubes as data sources and I think it is a mistake.
Tableau Software, while it is 3 or 4 times smaller then Qliktech, managed to be able to have more job openings then Qliktech and many of them in R&D, which is a key for a future growth! Tableau’s sales in 2011 reached $72M, workforce is 350+ now (160 of them were hired in 2011!), number of customers is more then 7000 now…
In case if you miss it, 2011 was successful for Spotfire too. In Q4 2011 Earnings Call Transcript, TIBCO “saw demand simply explode across” some product areas. According to TIBCO, “Spotfire grew over 50% in license revenue for the year and has doubled in the past two years”. If it is true, that means Spotfire Sales actually approached $100M in 2011.
As Neil Charles noted, that Qliktech does not have transparent pricing and “Qlikview’s reps are a nightmare to talk to. They want meetings; they want to know all about your business; they promise free copies of the software. What they absolutely will not do is give you a figure for how much it’s going to cost to deploy the software onto x analysts’ desktops and allow them to publish to a server.” I tend to agree that Qliktech’s pricing policies are pushing many potential customers away from Qlikview toward Tableau where almost all prices known upfront.
I hope I will wake up next morning or next week or next month or next quarter and Qliktech somehow will solve all these problems (may be perceived just by me as problems) and QLIK shares will be priced higher ($40 or above?) than today – at least it is what I wish to my Qliktech friends in new 2012…
Update on 3/2/12 evening: it looks like QLIK shares reading my blog and trying to please me: during last 2 months they regained almost $9 (more then 30%), ending the 3/2/12 session with $29.99 price and regaining more then $550M in market capitalization (qlik on chart to get full-size image of it):
I guess if QLIK will go in wrong direction again, I have to blog about it, and it will correct itself!
My best wishes for 2012 to the members of Data Visualization community!
By conservative estimates, which includes registered and active users of Data Visualization (DV) tools, DV specialists from customers of DV vendors, consultants and experts from partners of DV vendors and employees of those vendors, the Data Visualization (DV) community exceeds 2 millions of people in 2011! I am aware of at least 35000 customers of leading DV vendors, at least 3000 DV consultants and experts and at least 2000 employees of leading DV vendors.
With this audience in mind and as the extension of this blog, I started in 2011 the Google+ page “Data Visualization” for DV-related news, posts, articles etc., see it here:
Due the popular demand and the tremendous success of Tableau in 2011 (basically you can say that 2011 was a year of Tableau) I started recently the new blog (as an extension of this blog), called … “Data Visualization with Tableau”, see it here:
I also have some specific best wishes for 2012 to my favorite DV vendors.
To Microsoft: please stop avoiding DV market and build a real DV tool (as oppose to a nice BI stack) and integrate it with MS-Office the same way as you did with Visio.
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To Qliktech: I wish Qliktech will add a free Desktop Qlikview Reader, a free (limited of course) Qlikview Public Web Service and integrate Qlikview with R Library. I wish Qliktech will consider the consolidation of its offices and moving at least part of R&D into USA (MA or PA). I think that having too much offices and specifically having R&D far away from product management, marketing, consulting and support forces is not healthy. And please consider to hire more engineers as oppose to sales and marketing people.
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To TIBCO and Spotfire: please improve your partner program and increase the number of VAR and OEM partners. Please consider the consolidation of your offices and moving at least part of your R&D into USA (MA that is). And I really wish that TIBCO will follow the super-successful example from EMC (VMWare!) and spinoff Spotfire with public IPO. Having Spotfire as the part of larger parent corporation slows sales considerably.
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To Tableau: I wish Tableau will able to maintain its phenomenal 100% Year-over-Year growth in 2012. I wish Tableau will improve their partner program and integrate their products with R Library. And I wish Tableau will open/create API and add scripting to their products.
To Visokio: I wish you more customers, ability to hire more developers and other employees, more profit and please stay on your path!
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To Microstrategy, SAS, Information Builders, Advizor Solutions, Pagos, Panorama, Actuate, Panopticon, Visual Data Mining and many, many others – my best wishes in 2012!
One of the most popular posts on this blog was a comparison of Data Visualization Tools, which originally was posted more then a year ago where I compared those best tools only qualitatively. However since then I got a lot of requests to compare those tools “quantitatively”. Justification for such update were recent releases of Spotfire 4.0, Qlikview 11, Tableau 7.0 and Microsoft’s Business Intelligence Stack (mostly SQL Server 2012 and PowerPivot V.2.)
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However I quickly realized that such “quantitative” comparison cannot be objective. So here it is – the updated and very subjective comparison of best Data Visualization tools, as I see them at the end of 2011. I know that many people will disagree with my assessment, so if you do not like my personal opinion – please disregard it at “your own peril”. I am not going to prove “numbers” below – they are just my personal assessments of those 4 technologies – I love all 4 of them. Feel free to make your own comparison and if you can share it with me – I will appreciate it very much.
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Please keep in mind that I reserve the right to modify this comparison overtime if/when I will learn more about all those technologies, their vendors and usage. Criterias used in comparison below listed in 1st column and they are grouped in 3 groups: business, visualization and technical. Columns 2-5 used for my assessments of 4 technologies, last column used for my subjective weights for each criteria and last row of this worksheet has Total for each Data Visualization technology I evaluated.
I said on this blog many times that 80% of Data Visualization (DV) is … Data.
SQL Server 2012 is here.
And technology and process of how these Data collected, extracted, transformed and loaded into DV backend and frontend is a key to DV success. It seems to me that one of the best possible technology for building DV backend is around the corner as SQL Server 2012 will be released soon – Release Candidate for it is out…
And famous Microsoft marketing machine is not silent about it. SQL Server 2012 Virtual Launch Event planned for March 7, 2012 and real release probably at the end of March 2012.
Columnstore Index.
I already mentioned on this blog the most interesting feature for me – the introduction of Columnstore Index (CSI) can transform SQL Server into Columnar Database (for DV purposes) and accelerates DV-relevant Queries by 10X or even 100X of times. Oracle does not have it!
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Some reasonable rules and features applied to CSI: each table can have only one CSI; CSI has Row grouping (about million rows, like paging for columns); table with CSI cannot be replicated. New (unified for small and large memory allocations) memory manager optimized for Columnstore Indexes, supports Windows 8 maximum memory and logical processors.
Power View.
SSRS (Reporting Services) got massive improvements, including new Power View as Builder/Viewer of interactive Reports. I like this feature: “even if a table in the view is based on an underlying table that contains millions of rows, Power View only fetches data for the rows that are visible in the view at any one time” and UI features (some of them are standard for existing Data Visualization tools, like multiple views in Power View reports (see gallery of thumbnails in the bottom of screenshot below):
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“2 clicks to results”, export to PowerPoint etc. See also video here:
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PowerView is still far behind Tableau and Qlikview as a Visualizer, but at least it makes SSRS reports more interactive and development of them easier. Below are some thumbnails of Data Visualization samples produced with PowerView and presented by Microsoft:
Support for Big Data.
SQL Server 2012 has a lot new features like “deep” HADOOP support (including Hive ODBC Driver) for “big data” projects, ODBC drivers for Linux, grouping databases into Availability Group for simultaneous failover, Contained Databases (enable easy migration from one SQL Server instance to another) with contained Database users.
Parallel Data Warehouse, Azure, Data Explorer.
And don’t forget PDW (SQL Server-based Parallel Data Warehouse; massive parallel processing (MPP) provides scalability and query performance by running independent servers in parallel with up to 480 cores) and SQL Azure cloud services with it high availability features…
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New Data Explorer allows discover data in the cloud and import them from standard and new data sources, like OData, Azure Marketplace, HTML etc. and visualize and publish your Data to the cloud.
LocalDB.
LocalDB is a new free lightweight deployment option for SQL Server 2012 Express Edition with fewer prerequisites that installs quickly. It is an embedded SQL Server database for desktop applications (especially for DIY DV apps) or tools. LocalDB has all of the same programability features as SQL Server 2012 Express, but runs in user mode with applications and not as a service. Application that use LocalDB simply open a file. Once a file is opened, you get SQL Server functionality when working with that file, including things like ACID transaction support. It’s not intended for multi-user scenarios or to be used as a server. (If you need that, you should install SQL Server Express.)
BIDS.
SQL Server 2012 is restoring a very desirable feature, which was missing in Visual Studio 2010 for 2+ years – something called BIDS (BI Development Studio was available as part of Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008). For that a developer needs VS2010 installed with SP1 and then install “SQL Server Data Tools” (currently it is in the state of CTP4, but I guess it will be a real thing when when SQL Server 2012 will be released to production).
SSAS, Tabular Mode, PowerPivot, DAX.
Most important improvement for BI and Data Analytics will be of course the changes in SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services), including the addition of Tabular Mode, restoration of BIDS (see above), the ability to design local multidimensional cubes with PowerPivot and Excel and then deploy them directly from Excel as SSAS Cubes, the new DAX language shared between PowerPivot and SSAS, and availability of all those Excel Services directly from SSAS without any need for SharePoint. I think those DV tools who will able to connect to those SSAS and PowerPivot Cubes will have a huge advantage. So far only Tableau has it (and Omniscope has it partially).
Backend for Data Visualization.
All of these features making SQL Server 2012 a leading BI stack and backend for Data Visualization applications and tools. I just wish that Microsoft will develop an own DV front-end tool, similar to Tableau or Qlikview and integrate it with Office 201X (like they did with Visio), but I guess that DV market ( approaching $1B in 2012) is too small compare with markets for Microsoft Office and SQL Server.
Pricing.
Now is time for a “bad news”. The SQL Server 2012 CAL price will increase by about 27%. New pricing you can see below and I predict you will not like it:
Some of visitors to this blog after reading of my recent post about $300K/employee/year as a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) suggested to me another Indicator of the health of Data Visualization vendors: a number of job openings and specifically a number and percentage of software development openings (I include software testers and software managers into this category) and use it also as a predictor of the future. Fortunately it is a public data and below is what I got today from respective websites:
56(!) positions at Tableau, 14 them of are developers;
46 openings at Qliktech, 4 of them are developers;
21 positions at Spotfire, 3 of them are developers;
3 positions at Visokio, 2 of them are developers.
Considering that Tableau is 4 times less in terms of sales then Qlikview and 3-4 times less (then Qliktech) in terms of workforce, this is an amazing indicator. If Tableau can sustain this speed of growth, we can witness soon the change of Data Visualization landscape, unless Qliktech can find the way to defend its dominant position (50% of DV market).
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For comparison, you can use Microstrategy’s number of openings. While Microstrategy is not a Data Visualization vendor, it is close enough (as BI vendor) for benchmarking purposes: it has 281 openings, 38 of them are developers and current Microstrategy’s workforce is about 3069, basically 3 times more then Qliktech’s workforce…
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In light of recent releases of Qlikview 11 and Spotfire 4.0 it makes (soon to be released) Tableau 7.0 is very interesting to compare… Stay tuned!
I expected Qlikview 11 to be released on 11/11/11 but it was released today to Qliktech partners and customers. Since Qliktech is the public company, it releases regularly a lot of information which is not available (for now) from other DV leaders like Tableau and Visokio and more fuzzy from Spotfire, because Spotfire is just a part of larger successful public corporation TIBCO, which has many other products to worry about.
However I guessed a little and estimated for DV Leaders their 2011 sales and number of employees and got an interesting observation, which is true for a few last years: size of sales per employee (of DV leading vendor) is $300k/Year or less. I included for comparison purposes similar numbers for Apple, Microsoft and Google as well as for Microstrategy, which is a public company, established (22+ years) player in BI market, dedicated to BI and recently to Data Visualization (that is DV, thanks to it Visual Insight product).
Table below included 2 records related to Spotfire: 1 based on 2010 annual report from TIBCO (for TIBCO as whole; I know TIBCO sales for 2011 grew from $754M to $920M but do not know the exact number of TIBCO’s employees for 2011) and other record is my estimates (of a number of employees and sale) for Spotfire division of TIBCO. Update from 1/11/12: For Tableau’s 2011 I used the numbers from John Cook’s article here: http://www.geekwire.com/2012/tableau-software-doubles-sales-2011-hires-160-workers ) :
To me this is an interesting phenomena, because Qliktech thanks to its fast growing sales and recent IPO was able to double it’s sales in last 2 years while … doubling it’s number of employees so it still has its sales hovering around $300K/employee/year, while Software giants Apple, Microsoft and Google are way above this barrier and Microstrategy is 50% below it. I will also guess that Qliktech will try to break this $300K barrier and be closer to Apple/Microsoft/Google in terms of sales per employee.
Thanks to the public nature of Qliktech we know details of its annual Revenue growth and YoY (Year-over-Year) indicators:
and with estimate of 2011 Revenue about $315M, YoY growth (2011 over 2010) will be around 39.4% which is an excellent result, making it difficult (but still possible) for other DV competitors to catch-up with Qliktech. Best chance for this belongs to Tableau Software, who probably will reach the same size of sales in 2011 as Spotfire (my estimate is around $70M-$75M for both), but for last 2 years Tableau has 100% (or more) YoY revenue growth… Qliktech also published the interesting info about major factors for its sales: Europe (56%), Existing Customers (58%), Licenses (61%), Partners(52%):
which means that the increase of sales in Americas, improving New sales (as oppose to sales to existing customer by using “Land and Expand” approach) and improving revenue from Services and Maintenance may help Qliktech to keep the pace. Qliktech has the tremendous advantage over its DV competitors because it has 1200+ partners, who contributed 52% to Qliktech sales (about $136K per partner and I can guess that Qliktech wish to see at least $200K/year contribution from each partner).
Observing the strengths of other DV competitors, I personally think that Qliktech will benefit from the “imitation” of some of their most popular and successful features in order to keep its dominance in Data Visualization market, including:
free public Qlikview service (with obvious limitations) like free SaaS from Tableau Public and free Spotfire Silver personal edition,
ability to distribute Data Visualization to desktops without Server by making available a free desktop Qlikview Reader (similar to free desktop readers from Tableau and Omniscope/Visokio),
integration with R library (Spotfire and recently Omniscope) to improve analytical power of Qlikview users,
ability to read multidimensional OLAP Cubes (currently only Tableau can do that), especially Cubes from Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services and
scalability toward Big Data (currently Spotfire’s and Tableau’s data engines can use the disk space as Virtual Memory but Qlikview limited by size of RAM)
This is not a never ending “feature war” but rather a potential ability to say to customers: “why go to competitors, if we have all their features and much more”? Time will tell how DV competition will play out, I expect a very interesting 2012 for Data Visualization market and users and I hope that somebody will able to break $300K/employee/year barrier unless the major M&A will change the composition of DV market. I hope that the DV revolution will continue in new year…
I never liked pre-announcements of “new” products, especially if they are in state which will screw my PCs. But almost everybody doing it to us, starting with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (Denali can be downloaded as “CTP3”), Tableau 7.0, Qlikview 11 (Qliktech partners and customers can download “Release candidate”) etc. Just a few months after releasing Spotfire 3.3, TIBCO announced that Spotfire 4.0 will be available in November 2011 with a lot of new features.
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Some of them sound like buzzwords: “”free dimensional” analytics, collective intelligence, visual and social data discovery etc.” (we need that marketing will brainwash us, right?), but some of them can be very useful, like integration with TIBBR (that I like; in fact TIBCO has many other good products and they should be integrated with Spotfire) and SharePoint (sounds like a M$ bending to me, I don’t see too much DV money coming from SharePoint hole), support for dynamic icons, sparklines,
stepped linecharts, pop-over filters and legends, better font management, embedded actions and more. Some features I wish will be added, but I guess we need to wait more: I wish to be able to read with Spotfire the SSAS and PowerPivot multidimensional Cubes and support for some other Data Sources, like Tableau 6.1 does…
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Spotfire and its Web Player Server support now the latest web browsers, .NET 4.0 and it dropped support for obsolete stuff like Internet Explorer 6 and Windows 2003 Server. I mentioned on this blog earlier that I like Spotfire Silver 2.0 and the wealth and depth of Spotfire Analytical Platform (S-Plus, Miner, S+FinMetrics, Spotfire Developer/API, Statistics, Data and Automation Services, Metrics, Network Analysis, Decision Site, Clinical Graphics and more, this list should make Qliktech and Tableau worry or at least try to add similar features…).
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Spotfire updated their set of Demos to reflect Spotfire 4.0 features: Spotfire Demos and Templates. More to come later, especially when Spotfire 4.0 will be Released (as oppose to be announced).
Data Visualization has at least 3 parts: largest will be a Data, the most important part will be a Story behind those Data and a View (or Visualization) is just an Eye Candy on top of it. However only a View allows users to interact, explore, analyze and drilldown those Data and discover the Actionable Info, which is why Data Visualization (DV) is such a Value for business user in the Big (and even in midsized) Data Universe.
Productivity Gain.
One rarely covered aspect of advanced DV usage is a huge a productivity gain for application developer(s). I recently had an opportunity to estimate a time needed to develop an interactive DV reporting application in 2 different groups of DV & BI environments
Samples of Traditional and Popular BI Platforms.
Open Source toolsets like Jaspersoft 4/ Infobright 4/ MySQL (5.6.3)
MS BI Stack (Visual Studio/C#/.NET/DevExpress/SQL Server 2012)
Tried and True BI like Microstrategy (9.X without Visual Insight)
Samples of Advanced DV tools, ready to be used for prototyping
Spotfire (4.0)
Tableau (6.1 or 7.0)
Qlikview (11.0)
Results proved a productivity gain I observed for many years now: first 3 BI environments need month or more to complete and last 3 DV toolsets required about a day to complete entire application. The same observation done by … Microstrategy when they added Visual Insight (in attempt to compete with leaders like Qlikview, Tableau, Spotfire and Omniscope) to their portfolio (see below slide from Microstrategy presentation earlier this year, this slide did not count time to prepare the data and assume they are ready to upload):
I used this productivity gain for many years not only for DV production but for Requirement gathering, functional Specifications and mostly importantly for a quick Prototyping. Many years ago I used Visio for interactions with clients and collecting business requirements, see the Visio-produced slide below as an approximate example:
DV is the best prototyping approach for traditional BI
This leads me to a surprising point: modern DV tools can save a lot of development time in traditional BI environment as … a prototyping and requirement gathering tool. My recent experience is that you can go to development team which is completely committed for historical or other reasons to a traditional BI environment (Oracle OBIEE, IBM Cognos, SAP Business Objects, SAS, Microstrategy etc.) and prototype for such team dozens and hundreds new (or modify existing) reports in a few days or weeks and give it to the team to port it to their traditional environment.
These DV-based prototypes have completely different behavior from previous generation of (mostly MS-Word and PowerPoint based) BRD (Business Requirement Documents), Functional Specification, Design Documents and Visio-based application Mockups and prototypes: they are living interactive applications with real-time data updates, functionality refreshes in a few hours (in most cases at the same day as new request or requirement is collected) and readiness to be deployed into production anytime!
However, my estimate that 9 out of 10 such BI teams, even they will be impressed by prototyping capabilities of DV tools (and some will use them for prototyping!), will stay with their environment for many years due political (can you say job security) or other (strange to me) reasons, but 1 out of 10 teams will seriously consider to switch to Qlikview/Tableau/Spotfire. I see this as a huge marketing opportunity for DV vendors, but I am not sure that they know how to handle such situation…
Spreadsheets (VisiCalc or “Visible Calculator” was released by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston in October 1979 – 32 years ago – originally for Apple II computer) were one of the very first Business Intelligence (BI) software (sold over 700,000 copies in six years).
For historical purposes I have to mention that VisiCalc actually was not the first spreadsheet program invented (for example I am aware of multi-user spreadsheet software written before VisiCalc in USSR in PL/1 for mainframes with IBM’s IMS Database as a backend ), but it is a first commercial spreadsheet introduced on American market and it was a turning point of PC industry.
The “Visible Calculator” went on sale in November of 1979 and was a big hit. It retailed for US$100 and sold so well that many dealers started bundling the Apple II with VisiCalc. The success of VisiCalc turned Apple into a successful company, selling tens of thousands of the pricey 32 KB Apple IIs (no matter how hard Bob Frankston tried, he could not fit VisiCalc in the 16 KB of RAM on the low-end Apple II. VisiCalc would only be available for the much more expensive 32 KB Apple II) to businesses that wanted them only for the spreadsheet. Version of VisiCalc for Atari was even retailed for $200!
VisiCalc was published without any Patent and it is a living prove that Patent System currently is useless for people, abused by large corporations for their own benefit, and it is actually a brake for innovations and it is not protecting inventors. Absence of patent protection for VisiCalc created the Spreadsheet Revolution and Innovations (SuperCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, QuattroPro, Excel, OpenOffice’s Calc, Google’s Spreadsheets and many others) and tremendously accelerated PC industry.
As Dan Bricklin said it by himself “We all borrowed from each other” and as George Bernard Shaw said: “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple.But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
Application of Spreadsheets in the BI field began with the integration of OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) and Pivot tables. In 1991, Lotus (in addition to 1-2-3) released Improv with Pivoting functionality (also see Quantrix as a reborned [originally in 1994-95] Improv), followed by Microsoft’s release (in Excel 5) of PivotTable in 1993 (trademarked by Microsoft). 500+ millions people currently using Excel and at least 5% of them using it for BI and Data Visualization purposes. PowerPivot added to Excel 2010 speedy and powerful in-memory columnar database which enables millions of end-users to have a self-serviced BI.
Essbase was the first scalable OLAP software to handle large data sets that the early spreadsheet software was incapable of. This is where its name comes from: Extended Spread Sheet Database (Essbase owned by Oracle now). Currently one of the best OLAP and BI software is SSAS (Analysis Services from Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and upcoming SQL Server 2012 with its new Tabular mode) and Excel 2010 with its PowerPivot, PivotTables and Pivot Charts is one of the most popular front-end for SSAS.
There is no doubt that Excel is the most commonly used software for “BI purposes”. While Excel is general business software, its flexibility and ease of use makes it popular for data analysis with millions of users worldwide. Excel has an install base of hundreds of millions of desktops: far more than any other “BI platform”. It has become a household name.With certain precaution it can be used for a good or at least prototyping Data Visualization (most of charts below created with Excel):
From educational utilization to domestic applications to prototyping (or approximated) Data Visualization and enterprise implementation, Excel has been proven incredibly indispensable. Most people with commercial or corporate backgrounds have developed a proficient Excel skillset. This makes Excel the ultimate self-service BI platform and spreadsheet technologies as a common ground for all viable Data Visualization technologies on market.
is announced on 10/11/11 – one year after 10/10/10, the release date of Qlikview 10! Qliktech also lunched new demo site with 12 demos of Qlikview 11 Data Visualizations: http://demo11.qlikview.com/ . Real release happened (hopefully) before end of 2011, my personal preference for release date will be 11/11/11 but it may be too much to ask…
QlikView 11 introduces the comparative analysis by enabling the interactive comparison of user-defined groupings. Also now with comparative analysis business users have the power of creating any (own) data (sub)sets and decide which dimensions and values would define the data sets. Users can then view the data sets they have created side by side in a single chart or in different charts:
Collaborative Data Visualization and Discovery.
Also Qlikview 11 enables Collaborative Workspaces – QlikView users can invite others – even those who do not have a license – to participate in live, interactive, shared sessions. All participants in a collaborative session interact with the same analytic app and can see others’ interactions live, see
QlikView users can engage each other in discussions about QlikView content. A user can create notes associated with any QlikView object. Other users can then add their own commentary to create a threaded discussion. Users can capture snapshots of their selections and include them in the discussion so others can get back to the same place in the analysis when reviewing notes and comments. QlikView captures the state of the object (the user’s selections), as well as who made each note and comment and when. Qliktech’s press release is here:
“Our vision for QlikView 11 builds on the fact that decisions aren’t made in isolation, but through social exchanges driven by real-time debate, dialog, and shared insight,” says Anthony Deighton, CTO and senior Vice President, Products at QlikTech. “QlikView 11’s social business discovery approach allows workgroups and teams to collaborate and make decisions faster by collectively exploring data, anywhere, anytime, on any device. Business users are further empowered with new collaborative and mobile capabilities, and IT managers will appreciate the unified management functionality that allows them to keep control and governance at the core while pushing usage out to the edges of the organization.”
New Features in Qlikview 11
Qlikview now is integrated (I think it is a big deal) with TFS – source control system from Microsoft. This makes me think that may be Donald Farmer (he left Microsoft in January 2011 and joined Qliktech) has an additional assignment to make it possible for Microsoft to buy Qliktech? [Dear Donald – please be careful: Microsoft already ruined ProClarity and some others after buying them]. Free QlikView 11 Personal Edition will be available for free download by the end of year at www.qlikview.com/download.
Oracle’s timing for “unveiling Exalytics In-Memory Machine” was unfortunate because it was in a shadow of Steve Jobs. In addition It was a lot of distraction between Larry Ellison’s and Mark Benioff’s egos.
Oracle is late to Analytics appliance game and have to fight already released products like Netezza/IBM (proven performer), SAP HANA (has large sales pipeline already), family of Teradata Appliances (Teradata Columnar coming in 2 months and sounds very good to me plus it packaged with Information Builders BI) , EMC/Greenplum Data Computing Appliance (doubled the sales during last year!), Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse Appliance (Based on CTP3 I expect the great things from SQL Server 2011/2012/Denali) etc. They all are in-memory Machine, capable to store and process big data (exabytes? I guess depends on price…), almost all of them already have or will have soon columnar database.
Larry Ellison claimed during Oracle Openworld this week that “Exalytics is 10x faster than…just about everything.”
Yes, It runs a software stack that includes parallelized versions of Oracle’s TimesTen in-memory database and memory-optimized Essbase OLAP Server (“BI Foundation”), but it is not a columnar database, so I wonder how Oracle is going to prove Larry’s bold claims. However, Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Exalytics supports columnar compression that reduces the memory footprint for in-memory data. Compression ratios of 5X are practical and help expand in-memory capacity (Qlikview, PowerPivot and Spotfire can do much better “columnar compression” then 5 times, claimed by Oracle)
2 quad-data rate (QDR) 40 GB/s InfiniBand ports. When connected to Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalytics becomes an integral part of the Oracle Exadata private InfiniBand network and has high-speed, low latency access to the database servers. When multiple Oracle Exalytics machines are clustered together, the InfiniBand fabric also serves as the high-speed cluster interconnect.
Exalytics has Two 10 GB/s Ethernet ports for connecting to enterprise data sources
Exalytics has Four 1 GB/s Ethernet ports are available for client access
Exalytics includes 3.6TBs of raw disk capacity. Optionally, clusters of Oracle Exalytics machines can leverage network attached storage.
Hardware portion of it probably below $100000 (I saw a guesstimate of $87000) but most expensive probably will be the Essbase (Business Intelligence Foundation Suite with in-memory Cubes now and ability to replicate entire data warehouse into TimesTen in-memory database) with list price about $450000, so we are talking here about millions of dollars, which is (let’s wait and see the final pricing) will definitely reduce the number of potential buyers, especially considering weak Data Visualization and average BI functionality of Oracle’s software stack. According to Larry Ellison, Exalytics has 1TB of RAM but can hold five to 10TB of data in memory thanks to COLUMNAR compression.
Oracle Exalytics promotes self service analytics and makes it easier to develop analytics content by introducing a Presentation Suggestion Engine (PSE) which provides recommendations on type of visualizations to use to best represent a data set.
I do not expect anything spectacular from this “PSE”. For example Oracle proudly introduced “new micro charts and multi-panel trellis charts to visualize dense multi-dimensional, multi-page data on a single screen. The multi-panel trellis charts are particularly effective at displaying multiple visualizations across a common axis scale for easy comparison, to see a trend and quickly gain insights”:
but this micro charts available in much better shape and form for many years from Spotfire, Qlikview, Tableau etc. and relatively recently even from Excel.
In any case, Exalytics suppose to be well integrated with Oracle’s Exadata database machine and Exalogic application server. Mr. Ellison did some other bold claims like:
“For a given task, it will cost you less on an Exadata than it would on a plain old commodity server.”
“we move data around a hundred times faster than anyone else in this business”
“1,000 Exadata machines have been installed and 3,000 more will be sold this year”
“Java applications’ response times are 10 times as fast on Exalogic, and companies can serve many more users at once”
Special Note about Java.
I am not sure why Java is advantage for Oracle. Java is not welcome at Apple (can you say Objective C?), at Microsoft (can you cay C# ?) and recently even at Google (after Oracle sued Google for “misuse” of Java, which reminded me the Sun, disappearing after it sued Microsoft for … “misuse” of … Java). Together those 3 companies have almost all cash (almost $200B if you exclude Oracle as a Java Owner) software companies have worldwide (Apple has $76B+ in a bank, Microsoft has $60B+ and Google has about $40B – may be less after buying Motorola Mobility) and I am simply following the money here. If Oracle wishes to have the Java-based advanced Data Visualization, they are better buy Visokio and integrate their Omniscope with Exalytics and Exalogic instead of the inventing the wheel with PSE.
Do you want the 1st class Data Visualization on your cool Mac without any Virtual Machine with Windows? If so, your best choice will be the Omniscope 2.6 which is finally about to be released (after more then 2 years of delays) by Visokio, located in UK. Of course the Omniscope will run on Windows (most customers use it on Windows anyway) too: all it needs is Java (if needed, a private copy of Java will be installed on your computer as part of Omniscope package). You can get Omniscope Viewer on Linux workstation as well but if you need a full Omniscope 2.6 on Linux, you will have to ask Visokio about special license for you.
Java was the problem for me, when I first heard about Omniscope, but more about that in a Special note at the end of this post. Visokio is a tiny company, started in 2002. Because of its size and private funding it took 3 years to release Omniscope 1.0 in 2005 and another 4 years to release Omniscope 2.5 in 2009,
which is what Visokio currently is still shipping. Visokio obviously have rich customers in financial (13+ clients), publishing and marketing(10+), and many other industries and some of them in love with Apple’s Macs, but most customers prefer Windows. Omniscope is a Desktop Java application but completely integrated with internet. It has 4 editions (in both 32-bit and 64-bits versions), which are identical as far a deployment file-set concern, so all you need is buy an appropriate license. The installation process requires about 5 clicks, and user can get started by simply dragging in an Excel file and data will immediately appear and can be explored organically.
Omniscope Editions: Viewer, Desktop, Server, Server Plus.
Free Viewer allows server-less distribution of all Data Visualizations and interact fully (explore, select, filter and drill-down among other interactions) with all data, charts and reports, which are all can be easily exported to PDF, PPT, XLS and JPG files. Omniscope has zero-install “Web Start online version of free Viewer.
Omniscope Desktop/Professional ($4000 with discount for volume orders) in addition to all Viewer functionality, acts as a Development Studio for Data Visualizations (so called IOK applications are secure and compressed files, ready for easy internet delivery) and as a ETL wizard (using Drag-and-Drop Data Manager) for data:
Omniscope Desktop creates, edits and continuously refreshes all involved datasets, formulas, filters, views, layouts, even assumption-driven models, designs and export interactive Flash Data Players, embeddable into websites and into documents. Desktop able to read multidimensional cubes, just like Tableau and PowerPivot, which is a big advantage over Qlikview and Spotfire.
Omniscope Server (about $16000) adds to Desktop functionality: enables 64-bit IOK files behave (even remotely) as Central Datamarts (multi-source data assembly), as Timeslices (auto-refreshable proxies for datasources: one per each datasource), as Master Report IOK (automatically refreshed from Central Datamart IOK) and as Distributed Report IOK(s) (automatically distributed and live-refreshed from Master Report IOK), automates the refreshing of data, enables batch and scheduled distribution of customized IOK files.
Server Plus (about $24000) includes all Server functionality and adds ability to empower selected actions in free Omniscope Viewers (e.g. continuous data refreshing from Datamart IOK files, export to XLS, PPT, PDF, add/edit/save comments and queries etc.), permits unrestricted publishing of IOK visualizations, enables white labeling and branding Viewers and IOK files to customers specifications, allows multiple servers work as one.
Data Engine.
Omniscope is using in-memory Columnar Database, as all best Data Visualizers do but its architecture is different. For example, all datasets are collection of Cells (organized in column, rows and tables). Each Cell with String or Text is a separate Java Object and it leads to a large overhead in terms of memory usage (I always blame Java, which allows only 1.2GB of addressable memory for 32-bit Windows). Some usage statistics prompting that 32-bit Omniscope Desktop/Professional thinks that 5 millions cells is a large dataset and 15 millions cells is a very large dataset. According to Visokio, average client data file is around 40 fields and 50,000 records (2 million cells).
With Omniscope 2.6, experts from Visokio was able to run on 32-bit Windows PC (with 2GB of RAM) the Data Visualization with 70 millions of cells. For comparison with Qlikview I was able to fit 600+ millions of (data) cells into the same 32-bit PC, basically 9 times more data then with Omniscope and overall Omniscope is slower then competitors. As of now, Omniscope will try to use as much memory as possible in order to accelerate performance. I expect in near future the version of Omniscope with large performance and memory management improvements.
64-bit Installations of Omniscope are far more scalable, for example with 8GB of RAM 120 millions of cells was not a problem; largest known installation of Omniscope has 34 million Rows (about half of billion of cells) running on 64-bit Windows/Java PC with 16GB of RAM
In Omniscope 2.6, the DataManager can be used as an entirely new and independent application, allowing you to create and automate ETL workflows, without even loading data into the classic Omniscope interface. You can visually drag sources in, append and merge, and transform with a variety of powerful operations such as Field Organiser which allows you to add formulas. You can then publish, including a Batch Publisher which allows you to specify commands in another IOK file, such as “Publish [this subset] to [email] using [this view template]”, etc.
The original foundation of exportable Flash DataPlayer “generation” was totally re-written (for Omniscope 2.6) in ActionScript 3, which increased the scalability of DataPlayer and added new view types/features. DataPlayers available as an experimental feature in Omniscope 2.6, and fully feature-complete in Omniscope 2.7 (I personally think that the time for Flash is gone/over and it is time to port DataPlayers into HTML5).
Visokio is confident that Omniscope 2.7 will come soon after release of Omniscope 2.6 and it will be integrated with super-popular Open Source Statistical R Library, and hopefully will contain HTML5-based DataPlayer, integration with Salesforce etc. If customers will demand, I also expect the Linux version of Omniscope at some future point.
By the way, my recent Poll is confirming that Omniscope is among Data Visualization Leaders and it got respectable 6% of votes so far! You can vote on this poll, just click here!
Special Note about Java.
While Java gave Omniscope the unique ability to run everywhere, it also gave a performance disadvantage to it, compare with my favorites Qlikview, Spotfire, Tableau and PowerPivot (all 4 written as native Windows applications).
Teradata sounds good and smells like money, especially today. I already mentioned that they received U.S. Patent #7966340 on June 21, 2011. The patent is about SQL-MapReduce technology: the data analytic framework that combines the popular MapReduce™ software with the enterprise friendliness of SQL. (Also see article about “multi-structured data sources” from Aster Data).
Today Teradata Columnar is announced (available in December 2011 as a component of Teradata Database 14) and Teradata Database 14 is released. The new columnar capability from Teradata allows users to mix-and-match (“hybrid”) columnar and row-based physical storage when it best suits an application. Teradata Columnar is integrated with the row-based storage and relational database software. Only the data in the columns required for a query are pulled into memory for processing, reducing the time-constraining input/output of a row-based approach that would read data from all the columns.
Teradata Columnar brings traditional “columnar” benefit: the flexible data compression. Teradata Columnar dynamically adjusts the compression mechanisms for optimal storage depends on type and size of data involved, automatically chooses from among six types of compression: run length, dictionary, trim, delta on mean, null and UTF8 based on the column demographics.
Again, these are just a good sound bites until Teradata Columnar will be released. Teradata may be trying to out-market Microsoft with its SQL Server 2011 (or Denali; as of today available as CTP3 community release) which already has the Columnstore Index, integrated with row-based storage and relational database.
I am wondering if Tableau will able timely and natively support Teradata Columnar as it supports now the Teradata Database (important for Data Visualization applications):
This is a guest post from, Marc Gedansky, a well-known sales and marketing consultant in the Business Intelligence space. Marc writes and speaks frequently on a variety of issues that influence technology providers and users, and is based in Cambridge, MA. I am fortunate to know Marc as Business Intelligence and Data Visualization expert and as my friend for many years.
Recently I noticed that internet (thanks to big data waves and to easy to use Data Visualization tools) is polluted with a lot of useless Dashboards and I spoke with Marc about this topic. Turned out he has a a very good explanation for it and he was kind enough to share his opinion on this blog as a guest blogger. Marc’s post reminded me the old story:
“An admirer asked Michelangelo how he sculpted the famous statue of David that now sits in the Academia Gallery in Florence. How did he craft this masterpiece of form and beauty? Michelangelo’s offered this strikingly simple description: He first fixed his attention on the slab of raw marble. He studied it and then “chipped away all that wasn’t David.”
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Most dashboards are designed with no clue as to the meaning and/or importance of this quote.
(BTW, even though this is a blog about data visualization, I (M.G.) won’t show any poorly designed dashboard examples, as they are ubiquitous. Trying to find them is about as difficult as trying to find leaves
on the ground in New England during the Fall).
I view dashboards every day; on software company sites, news sites, financial sites, and blogs. Since dashboards can distill so much information and display it in such a small space, they hold the potential of quickly delivering valuable insights; of cutting through the “data clutter” to immediately reveal important trends or truths.
So why then, are most dashboards crammed with so many charts, dials, and graphs that they overwhelm you? Just because you can fit a half-dozen on a screen, why is there a need to do it? (This approach reminds me of my friend Geoff, who, upon hearing that Hellmann’s was coming out with mayonnaise that had half the calories remarked, “great, now I can eat twice as much”.)
I think there can only be two reasons.
1. The designer/developer wants to show off their expertise with Qlikview, or Spotfire, or Tableau, or X product.
2. The designer/developer does not care about the average person, and wants to build smart software for brilliant users.
That attitude reminds me of a meeting I attended at a software company a few years ago. The head of development was upset because he was being asked to make his software “easy to use”. He called it “dumbing down”, and complained that it would be less challenging for his development team to build “software for idiots”. At this point, the President of the company interjected, “if our customers are smart enough to write us a check, then they are smart enough to use our software. And the onus for them to be able to use our software is on us, not on them.”
Update 9/27/11: TIBCO officially released Silver 2.0, see http://www.marketwatch.com/story/tibco-unveils-silver-spotfire-20-to-meet-growing-demand-for-easy-to-use-cloud-based-analytics-solutions-2011-09-27 “TIBCO Silver Spotfire 2.0 gives users the ability to embed live dashboards into their social media applications, including business blogs, online articles, tweets, and live feeds, all without complex development or corporate IT resources… Overall, the software’s capabilities foster collaboration, which allows users to showcase and exchange ideas and insights — either internally or publicly. In addition, it allows users to share solutions and application templates with customers, prospects, and other members of the community.”
Spotfire Silver Personal Edition is Free (Trial for one year, can be “renewed” with other email address for free) and allows 50MB (exactly the same amount as Tableau Public) and allows 10 concurrent read-only web users of your content. If you wish more then Personal Edition you can buy Personal Plus ($99/year) or Publisher ($99/month or $1000/year) or Analyst ($399/month) Account.
In any case you will GET for your Account needs a real Spotfire Desktop Client and worry-free and hassle-free web hosting (by TIBCO) of your Data Visualization applications – you do not need to buy any hardware, software or services for web hosting, it is all part of your Spotfire Silver account.
To test Spotfire Silver 2.0 Personal Edition I took Adventure Works dataset from Microsoft (60398 rows, which is 6 times more than Spotfire’s own estimate of 10000 rows for 50MB Web storage). Adventure Works dataset requires 42MB as Excel XLS file (or 16M as XLSX with data compression) and only 5.6MB as Spotfire DXP file (Tableau file took approximately the same disk space, because both Spotfire and Tableau are doing a good data compression job). This 5.6MB size of DXP file for Adventure Works is just 11% of web storage allowed by Spotfire (50MB for Personal Edition) to each user of free Spotfire Silver 2.0 Personal Edition.
Spotfire Silver 2.0 is a very good and mature Data Visualization product with excellent Web Client, with Desktop Client development tool and with tutorials online here: https://silverspotfire.tibco.com/us/tutorials . Functionally (and Data Visualization-wise) Spotfire Silver 2.0 has more to offer then Tableau Public. However Tableau Public account will not expire after 1 year of “trial” and will not restrict number of simultaneous users to 10.
Spotfire Silver 2.0 Publisher and Analyst Accounts can compete successfully with Tableau Digital and they have much clear licensing then Tableau Digital (see http://www.tableausoftware.com/products/digital#top-10-features-of-tableau-digital ), which is based on number of “impressions” and can be confusing and more expensive then Spotfire Silver Analyst Edition.
7 months ago I published a poll on LinkedIn and got a lot of responses, 1340 votes (in average 1 vote per hour) and comments. People asked me many times to repeat this poll from time to time. I guess it is time to re-Poll. I added 2 more choices (LinkedIn allows maximum 5 choices in their polls and it is clear not enough for this poll), based on a feedback I got: Omniscope and Visual Insight/Microstrategy. I also got some angry voters complaining that certain vendors are funding this poll. This is completely FALSE, I am unaffiliated with any of vendors, mentioned in this poll and I am working for completely independent (from those vendors) software company, see the About page of this Blog.
Today Tableau 6.1 is released (and client for iPad and Tableau Public for iPad), that includes the full support for incremental Data updates whether they are scheduled or on demand:
New in Tableau 6.1
Incremental Data updates scheduled or on demand
Text parser faster, can parse any text files as data source (no 4GB limit)
Files larger than 2GB can now be published to Tableau Server (more “big data” support)
Impersonation for SQL Server and Teradata; 4 times faster Teradata reading
Tableau Server auto-enables touch, pinch, zoom, gesture UI for Data Views
Tableau iPad app is released, it browses and filters a content on Server
Any Tableau Client sees Server-Published View: web browser, mobile Safari, iPad
Server enforces the same (data and user) security on desktop, browser, iPad
Straight links from an image on a dashboard, Control of Legend Layout etc.
Here is a Quick demo of how to create Data Visualization with Tableau 6.1 Desktop, how easy to publish it on Tableau server 6.1 and how it is instantly visible, accessible and touch optimized on the iPad:
New since Tableau 6.0, more then 60 features, including:
Tableau now has in-memory Data Engine, which greatly improves I/O speed
Support for “big” data
Data blending from multiple sources
Unique support for local PowerPivot Multidimensional Cubes as Data Source
Support for Azure Datamarket and OData (Open Data Protocol) as Data Sources
Support for parameters in Calculations
Motion Charts and Traces (Mark History)
In average 8 times faster of rendering of Data Views (compare with previous version)
Tableau Product Family
Desktop: Personal ($999), Professional ($1999), Digital, Public.
Server: Standard, Core Edition, Digital, Public Edition.
Free Client: Web Browser, Desktop/Offline Tableau Reader.
Free Tableau Reader enables Server-less distribution of Visualizations!
Free Tableau Public served 20+ millions visitors since inception
Tableau Server
Easy to install: 13 minutes + optional 10 minutes for firewall configuration
Tableau has useful command line tools for administration and remote management
Scalability: Tableau Server can run (while load balancing) on multiple machines
Straightforward licensing for Standard Server (min 10 users, $1000/user)
With Core Edition Server License: unlimited number of users, no need for User Login
Digital Server Licensing based on impressions/month, allows unlimited data, Tableau-hosted.
Public Server License: Free, limited (100000 rows from flat files) data, hosted by Tableau.
Widest (and Tableau optimized) Native Support for data sources
Microsoft SSAS and PowerPivot: Excel Add-in for PowerPivot, native SSAS support
Native support for Microsoft SQL Server, Access, Excel, Azure Marketplace DataMarket
Other Enterprise DBMSes: Oracle, IBM DB2, Oracle Essbase
Analytical DBMSes: Vertica, Sybase IQ, ParAccel, Teradata, Aster Data nCluster
Database appliances: EMC/GreenPlum, IBM/Netezza
Many Popular Data Sources: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, ODBC, OData, Text files etc.
Some old problems I still have with Tableau
No MDI support in Dashboards, all charts share the same window and paint area
Wrong User Interface (compare with Qlikview UI) for Drilldown Functionality
Tableau’s approach to Partners is from stone ages
Tableau is 2 generations behind Spotfire in terms of API, Modeling and Analytics
Some of this samples are Tableau-specific, but others (may be with modifications) can be reused for other Data Visualization Platform and tools. I will appreciate feedback, comments and suggestions.
Data Visualization 
