June 15, 2011

Metaphors amok

It all started when I disputed James Kobielus’ blogged claim that Hadoop is the nucleus of the next-generation cloud EDW. Jim posted again to reiterate the claim, only this time he wrote that all EDW vendors [will soon] bring Hadoop into their heart of their architectures. (All emphasis mine.)

That did it. I tweeted, in succession:

*Woody Allen said in Sleeper that the brain was his second-favorite organ.

Of course, that body of work was quickly challenged. Responses included: 

*Linda agrees with me that oxygen is a nutrient, and she’s taught both physiology and English at the college level.

But seriously, folks — I disagree with Jim’s follow-up post a lot less than I do the first one. He’s still overstating the case, of course, and he still seems confused about how some of the pieces of technology work. Even so, I agree that Hadoop is likely to play an important role in many enterprises’ analytic ecosystems, both for its big bit bucket and parallel analytics capabilities.

Meanwhile, in unrelated puns, Chris Kanaracus and I had something of a pizza party:

“Too many [midsized] businesses’ ideas for slicing data don’t get far past the pie-chart level,” said analyst Curt Monash of Monash Research. “‘Big data’ isn’t even the issue for them; they could get much more value than they do now just from personal-sized data sets.”

That’s not the case with Northeast pizza chain Papa Gino’s, which is using IBM analytics software to crunch business data in many ways, said Martha Lieber, director of business systems for the 280-restaurant company, which also includes a number of D’Angelo sandwich shops.

This work has resulted in some delicious insights …

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