Happy new 2012!

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:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/111053008130113715119/

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:

http://tableau7.wordpress.com/ .

In 2011 I also started Google+ page for Tableau related news:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/112388869729541404591/

and I will start to use it soon in 2012

I also have some specific best wishes for 2012 to my favorite DV vendors.

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  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.

  
  


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  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!

  
  

Updated Comparison of Data Visualization tools

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.

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SQL Server 2012: good DV backend and BI stack

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:

Job openings as a KPI for DV vendors?

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:

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  56(!) positions at Tableau, 14 them of are developers;

  
  


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  46 openings at Qliktech, 4 of them are developers;

  
  


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  21 positions at Spotfire, 3 of them are developers;

  
  


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  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!