7.0 Release Notes

ThoughtSpot version 7.0.1 CU1 is now available. These release notes include information about new and enhanced features.

To see our feature deprecation plans, please see Deprecated and removed features.

For a complete list of issues that we fixed in this release, see Fixed issues.

Self-service upgrade is not supported for upgrade to version 7.0.1 CU1.

7.0.1 New Features and Functionality

For a complete list of issues that we fixed in this release, see Fixed issues.

Here are the most significant new features and improvements in the 7.0.1 Software Release:

For the Analyst

Search Assist Coach

Search Assist Coach enables Analysts, or anyone who has edit access to a Worksheet, to create Search Assist sample queries based on their company’s data. This gives all users the opportunity to experience onboarding and training on data that is relevant to their work, and specific to their line of business.

For the Business User

Search Assist

Search Assist introduces new users to ThoughtSpot’s Search experience by walking them through simple search scenarios on your company’s data. It demonstrates how anyone can get answers to their data questions by typing in the Search bar. Worksheet owners can use Search Assist Coach to create these sample search queries on your company’s data.

Search on enter experience

The default search experience is now Search on enter. This means that you can add new tokens to the search bar, or remove them, without altering your existing search, until you press the Enter key on your keyboard, or select Go to the right of the search bar.

You may need to press Enter or Go to ensure that ThoughtSpot updates your search with any new items in the search bar.

Search on enter

For the Data Engineer

Embrace

Embrace now supports Databricks Beta. Because this feature is in Beta, it is disabled by default. To enable Databricks, contact ThoughtSpot Support.

SAML configuration

When configuring SAML authentication for ThoughtSpot, it is now mandatory to map the mail attribute in the IDP metadata file to the email address of the user. If your company cannot meet this requirement, contact ThoughtSpot Support. For more information, refer to Configure SAML, specifically to Configure SAML 2.0.

7.0 New Features and Functionality

Here are the most significant new features and improvements in the 7.0.0 Software Release:

For the Analyst

Scriptability enhancements

There are several enhancements to the Scriptability feature:

Export custom SpotApps

You can now export your own custom SpotApps, or collections of Scriptable ThoughtSpot Answers, Pinboards, SpotIQ results, Views, tables, and Worksheets, packaged together as a zip file. Simply navigate to Data > SpotApps and choose the objects you would like to include in a custom SpotApp. Refer to SpotApps.

Add tables and columns to an Embrace connection

ThoughtSpot now allows you to use TML to edit tables created through Embrace, and add columns and tables that already exist in the external database to the connection. Refer to ThoughtSpot Modeling Language and specify the connection information when adding tables or table columns to an Embrace connection.

GUID handling

ThoughtSpot now recognizes pre-existing GUIDs on import, and asks if you would like to update the existing object or create a new one. Refer to Scriptability.

Improvements to generic join functionality Beta

The expanded functionality for generic joins in TML files allows the following elements:

Constants:

int, double, bool, date, and string

Comparison operators:

= (equal), != (not equal), < (less than), > (greater than), <= (less than or equal), and >= (greater than or equal)

Columns;
Boolean operators:;

AND and NOT

This feature is on by default.

Joins at the table level

You can now create and edit joins at the table level using TML, including range and generic joins. You must edit these joins from the source table, not the destination table. Refer to ThoughtSpot Modeling Language

Support for selective and linked filters

You can now import, export, and update pinboards with linked or selective filters.

Join creation interface

We improved the join workflows to support adding and updating joins on tables, worksheets, and views. See Join a worksheet to another data source and Join a table, View, or Worksheet to another data source.

Show underlying data for chasm traps

ThoughtSpot supports showing underlying data for searches based on schemas with chasm traps by default. If you do not want to show underlying data for schemas with chasm traps, contact ThoughtSpot Support.

For the Business User

Geo map support

We added support for states and state abbreviations, and also postal codes, for Mexico. See Geo Map reference.

For the Data Engineer

Embrace
Passthrough functions

Embrace passthrough functions are available for all Embrace connections. Passthrough functions allow you to send custom SQL expressions directly to your cloud data warehouse without being interpreted by ThoughtSpot. For more information, see Passthrough functions for Embrace and Passthrough function reference.

SAP HANA Update

Support for SAP HANA in Embrace is now GA. For more information, see SAP HANA.

Security passthrough Beta

Embrace now supports security passthrough for Google BigQuery connections, using OAuth for authentication and authorization. This feature is disabled by default. To enable it, contact ThoughtSpot Support.

Oracle Autonomous Database

Support for Oracle Autonomous Database (ADW) is now GA. For more information, see Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse.

DataFlow
Exadata database

See Exadata connections in DataFlow.

Greenplum database

See Greenplum connections in DataFlow.

Memsql database

See MemSQL connections in DataFlow.

Splunk file system

See Splunk connections in DataFlow.

Remote files Update

When connecting to remote files, DataFlow now supports the ORC and JSON file formats. See Flat file connections in DataFlow.

Connections for remote files support several new file formats; in addition to Delimited, we have support for Parquet, JSON , LDJSON Beta, and ORC .

Utilities

DataFlow includes support for utilities to configure SSL, so you can securely connect to the following source systems: SQLServer, Databricks Data Lake, PostgreSQL,IBM Db2, Greenplum, Oracle, and Teradata.

Home page

The DataFlow Home dashboard now shows both the historical and upcoming syncing information. It also supports search by table name. See DataFlow home.

Custom SQL

All DataFlow database connections (as listed in DataFlow for database sources) support retrieving data through a custom SQL expression.

Tips

The new DataFlow Tips section explains how to:

Truncate a table

Truncates the tables during syncs, instead of deleting.

Epoch date and timestamp options

Use epoch format in pre- and post-sync TQL scripts (CurrentDateEpochAdd` and `CurrentTimestampEpochAdd parameters).

Track the last sync start time

Use the $$LastSyncStartTime parameter in custom formulas.

Administration

The Administration interface lets you configure the staging directory and allowed paths for data files. See dataflow-configuration-options.adoc[Configure DataFlow server].

For the IT Ops Engineer

RHEL ease of installation

This release of ThoughtSpot makes it easier to deploy ThoughtSpot on an RHEL image. You can now enable SELinux when deploying ThoughtSpot on RHEL. If you enable SELinux, ensure that you install the yum setroubleshoot package.

Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) support

This release of ThoughtSpot introduces deployment support for Oracle Enterprise Linux. This decouples the OS and application files we shipped together in previous releases, and gives you the flexibility to run ThoughtSpot on an OEL image that your organization manages internally.

ThoughtSpot certifies OEL version 7.9 on AWS, GCP, and VMware. To deploy ThoughtSpot on OEL, you must have the Ansible tarball; you can obtain the tarball through your ThoughtSpot contact. For more information, see the RHEL and OEL Deployment guide.

New security logs

This release of ThoughtSpot enables your security team to collect security audit events based on user activity. You can view logs for the following events: Successful login, Failed login, Locked account, Profile change, Group creation, Group deletion, User group change, Group modification, Privilege change, User account creation, User account deletion, Password change, Object creation (Pinboard or Answer), Object deletion (Pinboard or Answer), Object modification (Pinboard or Answer), and Object sharing.

To view these logs, run the tscli logs collect command.

New cloud VM instance types

This release of ThoughtSpot introduces support for new cloud VM instance types for AWS and Azure. For all instance types, see the AWS configuration options and Azure configuration options.

AWS

The new AWS instance types are r5a.4xlarge, r5a.8xlarge, r5a.12xlarge, r5a.16xlarge, and r5a.24xlarge.

Azure

The new Azure instance type is D64s_v4.

Azure Disk Encryption

ThoughtSpot now supports Azure Disk Encryption (ADE) for clusters running on an RHEL image in Azure. Azure Disk Encryption provides volume encryption for both the OS and data disks of Azure virtual machines (VMs).

To configure Azure Disk Encryption for your cluster(s), contact ThoughtSpot Support.

Supported Upgrade Paths

If you are running one of the following versions, you can upgrade to the 7.0.1 CU1 release directly:

  • 6.2.x to 7.0.1 CU1

  • 6.3.x to 7.0.1 CU1

This includes any hotfixes or customer patches on these branches.

If you are running a different version, you must do a multiple pass upgrade. First, upgrade to version 6.2.x, or 6.3.x, and then to the 7.0.1 CU1 release.

To successfully upgrade your ThoughtSpot cluster, all user profiles must include a valid email address. Without valid email addresses, the upgrade is blocked.