Ask Any Question of Your Open Lakehouse with Dremio and ThoughtSpot

The adoption and proliferation of BI tools are growing exponentially as more organizations strive to democratize their data. According to EnterpriseAppsToday,  67% of employees will have access to a BI tool by the end of 2022. As more employees utilize BI tools to derive insights, technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), and search have become critical in lowering the barriers to adopting these BI tools. 

ThoughtSpot's powerful and intuitive Live Analytics platform empowers business users to create personalized, actionable insights from all of their cloud data. By leveraging search and AI, ThoughtSpot instantly analyzes billions of rows of data and returns insights which can then be curated, visualized, and shared in the form of Liveboards. This simplicity allows non-technical data consumers to focus on what’s important: making impactful, data-driven decisions in the moment.  

I am  excited to announce that ThoughtSpot now natively connects to Dremio’s open lakehouse platform! ThoughtSpot customers can now easily create a connection to Dremio through the ThoughtSpot UI in seconds. This makes it remarkably easy to create Liveboards and explore their data lakes with search functionality.

With Dremio and ThoughtSpot, customers can use ThoughtSpot’s search technology to easily ask questions and leverage Dremio’s robust query technology to return answers immediately. They can create interactive Liveboards on their data lakehouse faster than ever with seamless, out-of-the-box connectivity. With Dremio’s no-copy architecture, users can do all that without having to load the data into ThoughtSpot.

Why Dremio for ThoughtSpot

Search at scale: ThoughtSpot supports the ability to perform complex questioning of massive datasets and automatically surfaces new insights, trends, and anomalies with SpotIQ.  Dremio enables customers to execute high-performance queries directly on the data lake on as many as billions of records and get the results in seconds or less. 

Search ALL of your data: Dremio provides the ability to query data from a variety of sources, including Amazon S3, ADLS, GCS, on-premises data lakes, and other databases. Additionally, Dremio users can join data from multiple sources into one consistent view. This lets ThoughtSpot users ask questions and receive answers from ALL of their data,  improving visibility, consistency, and accuracy.

Self-service capability: Together, Dremio’s semantic layer and ThoughtSpot's true self-service Live Analytics capabilities make it easy for users to interact with data directly on the data lake. Users can find specific datasets and then easily connect to ThoughtSpot. This significantly decreases the time required for data consumers to gain access to the data. 

How to Get Started

Users can connect ThoughtSpot to Dremio Cloud and Dremio Software through ThoughtSpot’s Data Connection window. 

Step 1: Navigate to your ThoughtSpot UI and click on Data > Connections from the top navigation pane.

Step 2: Click Add Connection on the top right.

Step 3: Name your connection, click the Dremio icon, and press Continue.

Step 4: ThoughtSpot offers two ways to connect to Dremio: Service Account or OAuth. For Dremio Cloud, you can use a Personal Access Token (PAT) and the Service Account option or you can use OAuth. For Dremio Software, use the Service Account option. 

For OAuth, ThoughtSpot uses Okta. Please refer to Dremio Documentation for how to configure Okta with Dremio.

Dremio Cloud Examples

Dremio Software Example

Step 5: Once you have established the connection between ThoughtSpot and Dremio, you can select tables from Dremio. Note that ThoughtSpot is not loading the tables into memory, but is creating a persistent connection to those tables for you to easily access in the future. 

Now that you have connected Dremio to ThoughtSpot you can begin building interactive Liveboards and start asking and answering business questions with data.  

Here is an example of a Liveboard built using a dataset containing over a billion records:

Now that you’ve seen how easy it is to connect ThoughtSpot to Dremio, try it out for yourself! 

Sign up and try Dremio Cloud for FREE on AWS. If you’re not a current ThoughtSpot user, you can try ThoughtSpot free for 14 days.  Sign up for both and see how quickly you’ll be analyzing your data!

And if you're headed to Beyond 2022, make sure to by the Dremio booth (we’ll be at booth #14) to see for yourself how Dremio and ThoughtSpot can supercharge your business intelligence performance and insights!