Spotfire Ideas Portal
When retrieving on-demand data Spotfire's information designer supports creating temporary tables to avoid huge WHERE clauses (link) which can not only be a performance issue but infact hinder a query from being executed completelly. Temporary tables can also be usefeul when joining data across different databases (link).
All of the above becomes even more true when working with big data where you typically do not use the information designer, as it does not allow keeping data external / in-DB. Instead you use data connectors. Unfortunatelly data connectors do not support creating temporary tables.
Not sure this is related to this idea but in any case it would be great if data connectors could be upgraded to be more "big data ready".
Thanks for creating these individual ideas, Magnus. Not sure how the priorities are defined @Tibco but I'd like to say that even if this idea might have a lot more votes than the two separate ones you created, just teaching Data Connections temp tables w/o also implementing the other two ideas would be a dead end road for us, so maybe you can still somehow consider them as a bundle?
That said we've just learned as part of case 02092109 that Data Connections have another short coming compared to information links: you cannot use impersonation as authentication when they're used via the WebPlayer. Following your concept I have created a separate idea for it (https://ideas.tibco.com/ideas/TS-I-8651) but again it should be part of the bundle to allow us moving to data connections.
Thanks for your comment Mark. I took the freedom and created two ideas with your descriptions:
https://ideas.tibco.com/ideas/TS-I-8641 - Support multiple values prompt in data connections
https://ideas.tibco.com/ideas/TS-I-8642 - Support optional prompts in data connections
As it seems Tibco was leaning towards supporting temp tables in data connections rather than supporting external data in information links there are two very important things to consider which make information links much more usable today:
Information links allow for both optional and mandatory prompts but data connections seem to only support mandatory ones. This means you cannot have a data connection which serves multiple uses cases where one user would like to filter data by a date column and skip the product name prompt whereas another user does exactly the opposite.
Information links allow for manual input prompts where multiple values can be entered by the user ("Values") but data connections limit the input to a single value ("Manual input"). This means if you cannot afford a multiple selection prompt because the associated SELECT DISTINTC is too expensive you always have to wire up the data connection via on-demand which is time consuming and complicated.
In other words: if it is data connections then it must come with that optional/mandatory feature and multiple input values prompts as well.
Instead of teaching data connections how to use temporary tables one could also teach information links to keep the data external (in-DB) if that is less effort...
Thanks for a great idea Mark. A powerful enhancement well summarized.