===============
Anaconda Mosaic
===============

Heterogeneous Data Exploration
------------------------------

Overview
--------

Anaconda Mosaic is a module of the Anaconda Platform used for interactive 
exploration of larger-than-memory datasets. Anaconda Mosaic 1.3 was 
released on July 22, 2016, and is available as part of the `Anaconda 
Enterprise subscription <https://www.continuum.io/anaconda-subscriptions>`_. 
It is not available separately.

    **Mosaic Opening View**

.. figure:: /img/mosaic_open_full.png


Mosaic provides these core benefits:

1. **Write once, compute anywhere.** Mosaic translates the same computational
   code to various backends, including relational databases, NoSQL stores,
   Spark and more, by leveraging the power of `Blaze
   <https://blaze.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html>`_. You can access data
   in multiple data stores with the same code, and you can swap backends
   without rewriting queries or analytic pipelines.

2. **Push computations to the data.** For maximum efficiency, Mosaic will push 
   the computations to your data backend, minimizing the costly movement of
   data across the network and taking full advantage of the built-in highly
   optimized code featured in your data backend (PostgreSQL, Oracle, MongoDB,
   Spark, and more).

3. **Instantly work with large flat file repositories** Mosaic
   allows you to work with data scattered across directories of CSVs with
   minimal effort. You no longer have to write tedious Extract/Load/Transform
   (ETL) code! All you have to do is tell Mosaic how to parse the information
   embedded in the directory structure with simple wildcards.

4. **Collect all your data sources in one place.** Mosaic saves you time that
   would be wasted discovering what data is available and where it is located.

5. **Visually explore your data.** Mosaic provides many built-in visualizations, 
   including scatter plots, bar charts and more, allowing you to map variables 
   to different visual traits such as axis, color, glyph size and more. With 
   these visualizations you can quickly make sense of your data and test simple 
   hypotheses.

6. **Integrate seamlessly with an Enterprise environment.** Mosaic provides
   Enterprise-ready features such as provenance, governance and
   orchestration.


What's new in Mosaic 1.3?
-------------------------

1. **Add Excel spreadsheets.** Users can now load Excel spreadsheets containing 
   tabular data into Mosaic in xls, .xlsx or .csv format.  Click the top left 
   Add Dataset icon "+" and in the dialog box that appears, enter the path and 
   filename to the spreadsheet, then create expressions or plots to explore the 
   data.  Users can also join their Excel spreadsheet data with other datasets 
   by using the `join` operation. 

2. **Improved downsampling** functionality and controls to further enable 
   interactive exploration of large datasets. Click the "Settings" icon 
   immediately above the tabular data display, then specify any number of 
   either the first or last rows.

3. **Enhanced "Add Dataset" dialog** to enable custom arguments for every 
   computational backend.  This gives  users full control over the configuration 
   parameters for the various backends.  Additionally, the dataset is 
   automatically reloaded when a configuration parameter is changed. Click the 
   top left Add Dataset icon "+" and in the dialog box that appears, Add Custom 
   Fields section, click the "+" icon and add one or more extra options, which 
   correspond to key-value pairs. Values must be string, integer, or list. Keys 
   will be parsed as strings. Input examples: 1, "two", [3, 4, 5]

4. **New "Edit Metadata" dialog** to allow the user to easily edit the metadata 
   and custom arguments associated with a dataset. This functions much the same 
   way as Add Dataset above.

5. **New row count button** allows users to refresh the count of the underlying 
   dataset relative to the current expression. Simply click the "Refresh" icon 
   in the bottom right "Datashape" menu.

See the :doc:`releasenotes` for further information.

Help & support
--------------

If you have any questions or problems with Anaconda Mosaic, and you are a
current Anaconda Enterprise subscriber, please contact your support 
representative.

What's next?
------------

If you are an Anaconda Enterprise subscriber and want to try out Anaconda 
Mosaic, `get in touch <http://know.continuum.io/Anaconda-Mosaic.html>`_,
and learn more about Anaconda Mosaic:

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 1
   
   install
   getting-started
   user-guide
   lux-tutorial
   glossary
   releasenotes
