Adding data sources in Spotter

To connect Spotter to your first data source, you must contact ThoughtSpot. For details, see Next steps. After connecting your first data source, you will be able to add additional data sources yourself.

If your company stores source data externally in data warehouses, you can use ThoughtSpot Connections to directly query that data and use ThoughtSpot’s analysis and visualization features.

On ThoughtSpot Spotter, you can connect to the following external databases:

How it works

  • Create a connection to the external database

  • Choose from each table the columns that you want to explore in your live query.

  • Primary key and foreign key relationships are imported along with the primary and foreign key tables.

  • If there are any joins in the tables of your connection, Connections imports these joins.

  • After your connection is complete, it becomes a linked data source in ThoughtSpot, so you can query the external database directly.

  • It’s also easy to apply transformations, and filter the data.

  • Users with can manage data or admin privileges can share connections with other users or groups that have can manage data privileges. Once granted access to a connection, users can add, remove, and modify tables in that connection.

On a periodic basis, ThoughtSpot fetches the unique values for all attribute data within the limit reflected in ThoughtSpot. ThoughtSpot uses these scheduled queries to surface recommendations to users in our Search interface as well as to power our Liveboard explore feature. Under normal usage, this process results in very little credit consumption compared to the usage for powering Liveboards. By default, ThoughtSpot indexes attribute data every 24 hours; to change this frequency, contact ThoughtSpot Support.

Key benefits

  • Set up and deploy ThoughtSpot faster by connecting directly to the external database.

  • Eliminate the need to move data into ThoughtSpot for analysis.

  • Centralize data management and governance in the external database.

  • Save significant time and money by avoiding ETL pipelines.

  • Connect to multiple external databases.

Limitations

Connections does not support joins across connections.

Feature availability in Connections on ThoughtSpot Spotter

Here are the major features that are not currently available in Connections:

  • SpotIQ: Instant insights, Did you know?, Liveboard insights, Analyze

  • Monitor

Additional specific exceptions

The following list captures the specific limitations across the different databases of Connections. Databases not listed here have full support.

General: all databases
Sample values

Connections does not internationalize sample values in tables.

Delayed UI rendering

For connections with a very large number of tables (on the order of 1000’s of tables), UI rendering may take a very long time. These connections may time out.

Deleting columns

After specifying a connection, columns cannot be deleted from the table. Editing a connection makes it possible to add additional columns, but not to remove them.

Next steps

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