Data caching

ThoughtSpot does all analysis against data in memory to help achieve fast results across millions and billions of records of data.

ThoughtSpot caches data as relational tables in memory. You can source tables from different data sources and join them together. ThoughtSpot has several approaches for getting data into the cluster.

Data caching architecture diagram. A Data sources icon has an arrow pointing to the following 4 boxes: ThoughtSpot Embrace
For cases where your company stores data externally, use connections to access and query your data. To cache your data within ThoughtSpot, you can load it directly using DataFlow, or the tsload command-line utility. JDBC and ODBC drivers are also available.

ThoughtSpot connections

If your company stores source data externally in data warehouses, you can use Connections to directly query that data and use ThoughtSpot analysis and visualization features, without moving the data into ThoughtSpot. While connections cache metadata, they do not cache the data itself within ThoughtSpot.

You can connect to the following external databases:

Amazon Aurora logo
Amazon Aurora logo
Amazon RDS logo
Amazon RDS logo
Amazon Redshift logo
Azure Synapse logo
Databricks logo
Denodo logo
Dremio logo
Generic JDBC logo
Google BigQuery logo
MySQL logo
Oracle logo
PostgreSQL logo
Presto logo
SAP HANA logo
SingleStore logo
Snowflake logo
SQL Server logo
Starburst logo
Teradata logo
Trino logo

ThoughtSpot DataFlow

Dataflow is a capability in ThoughtSpot through which users can easily ingest data into ThoughtSpot from dozens of the most common databases, data warehouses, file sources, and applications. If your company maintains large sources of data externally, you can use DataFlow to easily ingest the relevant information, and use ThoughtSpot’s analysis and visualization features. After you configure the scheduled refresh, your analysis features are always up-to-date. DataFlow supports a large number of databases, applications, and file systems.

JDBC and ODBC Drivers

ThoughtSpot provides a JDBC and ODBC driver that can be used to write data to ThoughtSpot. This is useful for customers who already have an existing ETL process or tool, and want to extend it to populate the ThoughtSpot cache.

JDBC and ODBC drivers are appropriate under the following circumstances:

  • have an ETL load, such as Informatica, SSIS, and so on

  • have available resources to create and manage ETL

  • have smaller daily loads

tsload

You can use the tsload command line tool to bulk load delimited data with very high throughput. Finally, individual users can upload smaller (< 50MB) spreadsheets or delimited files.

We recommend the tsload approach in the following cases:

  • initial data load

  • JDBC or ODBC drivers are not available

  • there are large recurring daily loads

  • for higher throughput; this can add I/O costs

Choosing a data caching Strategy

The approach you choose depends on your environment and data needs. There are, of course, tradeoffs between different data caching options.

Many implementations use a variety of approaches. For example, a solution with a large amount of initial data and smaller daily increments might use tsload to load the initial data, and then use the JDBC driver with an ETL tool for incremental loads.