How to load CSV files into the ThoughtSpot free trial

Are you looking for an easy way to get the right data into the hand of the decision makers in your organization? Then you need analytics built from the ground up with search and NLP. While leading BI vendors claim to have bolted on search capabilities to desktop platforms, they can’t handle real scale, require data movement, or fail in real world environments. 

Not ThoughtSpot. But you shouldn’t take our word for it. The easiest way for you to cut through all this marketing hype and confusion is to try for yourself. And not with a curated dataset, but with your own data.

I know from experience the pain many of you have felt trialing new analytics tech. Ten years ago I was part of an initiative to identify the right self-service business intelligence platform at one of the largest nonprofits in the world. It was a well thought out process, but incredibly time consuming. It took weeks to vet vendors, and even longer to get connected to our trial database, deployed, and in the hands of users. 

Fast forward to 2021, and the cloud has changed the way organizations evaluate solutions. With ThoughtSpot offering a free cloud trial and similar offerings from cloud data warehouse and data integration vendors, you can experience self-service analytics on your data within a single day. And that is starting from scratch. If you already have your data in a cloud data warehouse, it takes minutes.

Here are four steps to trying self service analytics on your own data. If you already have your data in Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Azure Synapse, or Google Big Query, you can skip straight to step 4. And if you're looking to try ThoughtSpot on a single CSV file, you don't even need to load your data into a CDW thanks to ThoughtSpot's built-in CSV Upload!

Step 1 - Extract your data

As a sales engineer during the early days at Snowflake, I am familiar with a variety of ways to get your data into the cloud. The simplest is typically to dump it out as file data in CSV format. Just be sure to select a delimiter that doesn’t appear in the data or use double quotes for text fields.

Step 2 - Launch a free trial of Snowflake

Simply add your information to Snowflake’s free trial to get started. Anyone with a valid email address gets $400 of free usage without even needing to enter a credit card number.

Step 3 - Use Snowflake Partner Connect to launch either Fivetran or Matillion

Snowflake Partner Connect makes it super easy to get started with a data integration solution. You could upload your CSVs using SnowSQL (Snowflake’s command-line tool), but it is even easier to upload the files with either of these applications. Both options handle table creation and simplify the process of loading your data into Snowflake. Once again you can try either one with a no commitment free trial. 

Step 4 - Launch your ThoughtSpot trial and connect to your data

With your data loaded into Snowflake, you are ready to get started with ThoughtSpot. Register and be up and running within minutes. The ThoughtSpot onboarding experience will walk you through connecting to Snowflake, selecting your newly created tables, and defining the joins between the tables. The process is just as simple for Redshift, Synapse, and BigQuery if you prefer one of those instead.

Zero-to-Search in Seconds

With ThoughtSpot connected to the tables in your cloud data warehouse, you are ready to start searching your data to find the answers to your business questions. A process that used to take months can be done in minutes. Even better, when you are ready to deploy a production instance, ThoughtSpot Cloud makes it quick and easy to deploy at any scale.

So what are you waiting for? Get started with your own data, or even a public dataset, and see the power of search and NLP for yourself.