Streaming DB Connector

A streaming database connector is an advanced database access technology that supports a high-performance, direct interface between remote-server data and the analytic functionality of Statistica products.

This technology accesses large databases using a one-step process that does not require creating local copies of the data. Streaming DB connectors significantly increase the performance of Statistica and are particularly well suited for large data mining and exploratory data analysis tasks.

These performance gains are a result of not having to import the data into a local copy, as well as Statistica's asynchronous and distributed-processing architecture. Specifically, a streaming database connector uses the processing resources (e.g., multiple CPUs) of the database servers to execute the query, extract the requested data records, and send them to the Statistica workstation. Finally, Statistica simultaneously processes these records as they arrive.

Through automation, there are two main interfaces. The first interface is DBTable, which provides programmatic access to the streaming DB connector document. Here, you can access standard document methods and properties (e.g., Visible, Activate, Close, etc.) and also the streaming DB connector specific options (e.g., cursor type, location, query string, etc.). Its read-only property Spreadsheet returns the Spreadsheet wrapper around the ADO Recordset. Refer here for an example of using a DBTable, and here for an example demonstrating the Statistica OLE DB provider.

The second interface is DBSpreadsheet. This interface is used internally by the streaming DB connector to create the Spreadsheet wrapper object, and could also be used by users writing their own macros or programs, although in most cases the DBTable interface is sufficient and will itself use a DBSpreadsheet object. This interface has two methods, Open and CreateNew. Open executes the supplied query and opens an ADO Recordset. It creates a Spreadsheet wrapper object and attaches the ADO Recordset to it, and returns this Spreadsheet object. CreateNew creates a Spreadsheet wrapper object that is not attached to any Recordset and therefore is not useable until you call its SetRecordset method to attach your own ADO Recordset object.