Among the startups slated to exhibit at next week’s Strata + Hadoop World conference is Trifacta Inc. with its namesake data wrangling platform, which is receiving a major update in the run-up to the show meant to help users become a lot more productive in how they process their information. The biggest change is coming to the visual usage model at the heart of the software.

“Predictive Interaction” is an approach to working with data that Trifacta’s three co-founders, two of whom are computer science professors, developed to cut the massive amount of manual work traditionally involved in extracting insights. It’s quite similar to the continuous integration movement in that the main focus is on helping users iterate through new ideas and revisions faster.

But instead of containers and build systems, Trifacta implements that vision in the form of a visual workbench that makes it possible to examine how a statistical operation affects a dataset without having to switch back and forth from the command line. The platform then examines the results and brings up automated recommendations on how the user might proceed from there.

Trifacta 3.0 introduces the ability to replace the selection of queries that the system brings up by default with so-called “Transformation Suggestion Cards” that present the available options in a format that is more straightforward to interpret and apply. That extends the appeal of the platform to beyond data scientists to a much broader set of workers within the enterprise.

Both sets of users benefit from the other additions introduced in conjuction, most notably a new discovery feature that can automatically identify delimiters within datasets. That means an analyst for, say, a major retailer, can have a file containing information about several different customer segments immediately organized for processing upon upload without having to perform any of the usual preparations before getting to work.

Joining the new productivity features for data scientists is a parallel set of improvements geared towards the operations professionals who support their work. Analyses performed in Trifacta can now be executed using either Cisco System Inc.’s Tidal workload scheduler for Hadoop, which is what the platform uses to handle data under the hood, or the open-source Chronos alternative.

The new release also adds compatibility with a number of other complementary technologies, including the Kerberos authentication protocol, which removes the need for administrators to manage the security of their Trifacta deployment separately from the Hadoop cluster on which it’s running. That eliminates much of the duplicate work currently involved in day-to-day maintenance.

Image via Trifacta