We made ThoughtSpot 6.2 just for you

ThoughtSpot 6.2 is now available, and we made it just for you. This seems like a pretty bold claim for me to make, right?  How can I be so sure? We probably haven’t spoken directly about what should be in it.  

The reason I’m sure is because 6.2 has features for every type of user - we call them Personas at ThoughtSpot. Let’s go through them one at a time, and if you don’t see something you like, we want to hear from you!

Business Users

Business users are at the core of what ThoughtSpot is about. No longer must they wait endlessly for Analysts to get back to them with answers to their questions - now they can get answers themselves! Here are 2 new features for Business users.

  1. Answer Explorer 2 makes it even easier for business users to ask follow-up questions about what they see in Pinboards. Some questions are more easily answered if you don’t have to start from scratch, and now every visualization is a jumping off point for analysis, regardless of users’ skill level. 

Exploring data in ThoughtSpot.

2. Share Visualization comes into play at one of the most exciting moments in data analysis: when you’ve found the answer and you are trying to drive action in your company! What you want in this case is a way to send another user straight to the Pinboard viz you are looking at, and now that’s possible. Just click the new Share button on every viz to generate a link that will take the user straight into Answer Explorer with that viz front and center.

Sharing a visualization in ThoughtSpot.

Analysts

Analysts are data stars, and nothing gives them leverage like ThoughtSpot. Analysts who can only help dozens of users on other BI platforms can influence thousands with ThoughtSpot, and now we’ve increased their power even more with new features.

  1. High Cardinality charts now allow legends with up to 250 items and 20,000 data points, a 6X and 20X increase over previous limits!

A bar chart of total revenue by category and color in ThoughtSpot.
  1. Table Formatting is now at parity with charts. In 6.0 we greatly enhanced the formatting options available in charts, and now all the same formatting options are possible on tables as well.

Data Engineers

Behind every star Analyst, you will find Data Engineers making it all possible, and we have made massive improvements for this group in 6.2 that come in 2 flavors, one for each way to get your data into ThoughtSpot.

  1. DataFlow is our all new system for ingesting data into Falcon, ThoughtSpot’s proprietary database, and the improvement is night and day. With support for dozens of the most common databases, a point and click interface, granular column selection, incremental data loads, flexible column mapping, and sync scheduling features, we have completely changed the user experience of this critical feature.  

  2. Embrace is what you need when you want to query your existing database directly, and in 6.2 we’ve added support for Teradata Vantage 16.2+ and SAP HANA 2.0 on-prem (Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Azure Synapse were already supported before 6.2).  Embrace is the ultimate in ease of use for Data Engineers, as there’s no need to move the data at all - just query it in place.   

Choosing connection type in ThoughtSpot.

IT Ops Engineers

At the bottom of the stack are the true heroes: IT Ops Engineers. Does your house have a foundation?  How important is it that there be no issues with that foundation? IT Ops Engineers know what I’m talking about. We have made 2 big improvements for this Persona.

  1. Deployment Options are crucial - sometimes you need to deploy on the platform that your company has.  We now support deployment on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (ThoughtSpot 6.0.4+) and Amazon Linux 2 (ThoughtSpot 6.1.1+).

  2. Our Reimagined Admin Console gives IT Ops Engineers control of everything they need to keep the system humming.  Configure user groups, active directory, SAML, NAS, create snapshots and more with this easy to use point and click interface.  

Creating a snapshot in ThoughtSpot.

It’s hard to believe we packed so much goodness into just one release, with features for so many different types of users. That’s how we make every user feel like ThoughtSpot is just for them - no matter what part of the business intelligence space they live in.