Spotfire supports in-memory and in-database analytics. So far in this book, we have only been using in-memory data and analytics. Spotfire's in-memory data engine is highly optimized for working with small, medium, and large datasets, but eventually, your computer is likely to run out of memory if you have very large datasets. People often ask me: how large is a very large dataset? Or how much data can Spotfire work with in-memory? For me, this is one of the most difficult questions to answer!
It really depends on how many rows and how many columns of data you are working with. I generally find that the Spotfire in-memory data engine can handle hundreds of millions of rows of data with tens of columns, or hundreds of thousands of rows with thousands of columns. If a dataset is bigger than that, then I recommend using in-database analytics...
