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The Twitter ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live data from Twitter, directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

With the Twitter ODBC Driver accessing live Tweets, Followers, Messages, Searches, etc. is as easy as querying a database.

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Visualize Twitter Data in TIBCO Spotfire through ODBC


The ODBC standard has ubiquitous support and makes self-service business intelligence easy. Use the ODBC Driver to load Twitter data into TIBCO Spotfire.

This article walks you through using the CData ODBC Driver for Twitter in TIBCO Spotfire. You will use the data import wizard to connect to a DSN (data source name) for Salesforce and build on the sample visualizations to create a simple dashboard.

Connect to Twitter as an ODBC Data Source

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

All tables require authentication. You can connect using your User and Password or OAuth. To authenticate using OAuth, you can use the embedded OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL or you can register an app to obtain your own.

If you intend to communicate with Twitter only as the currently authenticated user, then you can obtain the OAuthAccessToken and OAuthAccessTokenSecret directly by registering an app.

See the Getting Started chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

Create Visualizations of Twitter Tables

Follow the steps below to connect to the DSN and create real-time data visualizations:

  1. Click Data -> Add Data ...
  2. Click Other -> Load data with ODBC, OLE DB, or ADO.NET data provider.
  3. In the Data Source Type menu, select ODBC Data Provider and click Configure.
  4. Select the DSN.
  5. Select the tables that you want to add to the dashboard. This example uses Tweets. You can also specify an SQL query. The driver supports the standard SQL syntax.
  6. If you want to work with the live data, click the Keep Data Table External option. This option enables your dashboards to reflect changes to the data in real time.

    If you want to load the data into memory and process the data locally, click the Import Data Table option. This option is better for offline use or if a slow network connection is making your dashboard less interactive.

  7. After adding tables, the Recommended Visualizations wizard is displayed. When you select a table, Spotfire uses the column data types to detect number, time, and category columns. This example uses Retweet_Count in the Numbers section and From_User_Name in the Categories section.

After adding several visualizations in the Recommended Visualizations wizard, you can make other modifications to the dashboard. For example, you can zoom in on high probability opportunities by applying a filter on the page. To add a filter, click the Filter button. The available filters for each query are displayed in the Filters pane.