What's the best interactive Analysis and Plotting Tool for software testing?

Question

My realtime app generates a data log: 100 words of data @10Khz. I need to analyze it and produce some plots of the results. There are intermediate calculations involved - I need to take some differences, averages, etc. Excel would work fine, except for:

• the 32000 item limit on graph data series is too small - that's only 3 seconds of data.
• the glacial speed at which it processes changes to graphs containing large data series is unbearable.

What are good alternatives to Excel for manipulating and plotting large quantities of data? I'm looking for something interactive, not a library.

Answer 1

For this sort of stuff we typically roll our own, but I know that isn't the solution you want. Can you use a good quality database (eg Oracle) to do the manipulation, then maybe put the summarized data back into Excel for the plotting? I believe Excel will link to databases these days, so you could make it quite automated.

Otherwise there are statistical tools like [SAS][1], but get your cheque book out first.

[1]: http://www.sas.com/technologies/analytics/statistics/stat/index.html SAS