Analytic technologies
Discussion of technologies related to information query and analysis. Related subjects include:
- Business intelligence
- Data warehousing
- (in Text Technologies) Text mining
- (in The Monash Report) Data mining
- (in The Monash Report) General issues in analytic technology
Further quick SAP/Sybase reactions
Raj Nathan of Sybase has been calling around to chat quickly about the SAP/Sybase deal and related matters. Talking with Raj didn’t change any of my initial reactions to SAP’s acquisition of Sybase. I also didn’t bother Raj with too many hard questions, as he was clearly in call-and-reassure mode, reaching out to customers and influencers alike.
That said, Read more
SAP believes in database proliferation
For as long as we’ve had the concept of database management, there’s been a debate as to whether it is realistic for large enterprises to have a single Grand Unified Enterprise Storehouse Of All Information, or whether database proliferation actually makes sense. This argument has been particularly intense in the area of data warehouse/data marts. I’m generally on the side of data mart proliferation.
4 1/2 years ago, I noted that SAP believed strongly in database proliferation: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, SAP AG, Theory and architecture | 3 Comments |
Quick reactions to SAP acquiring Sybase
SAP is acquiring Sybase. On the conference call SAP said Sybase would be run as a separate division of SAP (no surprise). Most of the focus was on Sybase’s mobile technology, which is forecast at >$400 million in 2010 revenues (which would be 30%ish of the total). My quick reactions include: Read more
8 not very technical problems with analytic technology
In a couple of talks, including last Thursday’s, I’ve rattled off a list of eight serious problems with analytic technology, all of them human or organizational much more than purely technical. At best, these problems stand in the way of analytic success, and at least one is a lot worse than that.
The bulleted list in my notes is:
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Individual-human
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Expense of expertise
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Limited numeracy
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Organizational
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Limited budgets
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Legacy systems
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General inertia
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Political
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Obsolete systems
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Clueless lawmakers
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Obsolete legal framework
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I shall explain. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data integration and middleware, Data warehousing, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Surveillance and privacy | Leave a Comment |
Revisiting disk vibration as a data warehouse performance problem
Last April, I wrote about the problems disk vibration can cause for data warehouse performance. Possible performance hits exceeded 10X, wild as that sounds.
Now Slashdot and ZDnet have weighed in, although for the most part they only are suggesting 50-100% performance hits. Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Storage | 3 Comments |
Notes and cautions about new analytic technology
As previously noted, I headlined Aster’s Big Data Summit in Washington, DC last Thursday. More than others, that talk did reuse material I’d presented before. I promised the audience that when I got back I’d put up a blog post linking to supporting material for the talk.
Part of the time, I talked about things I’ve written about before. For example: Read more
| Categories: Aster Data, Business intelligence, Data warehousing, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, Presentations | 3 Comments |
Clarifying the state of MPP in-database SAS
I routinely am briefed way in advance of products’ introductions. For that reason and others, it can be hard for me to keep straight what’s been officially announced, introduced for test, introduced for general availability, vaguely planned for the indefinite future, and so on. Perhaps nothing has confused me more in that regard than the SAS Institute’s multi-year effort to get SAS integrated into various MPP DBMS, specifically Teradata, Netezza Twinfin(i), and Aster Data nCluster.
However, I chatted briefly Thursday with Michelle Wilkie, who is the SAS product manager overseeing all this (and also some other stuff, like SAS running on grids without being integrated into a DBMS). As best I understood, the story is: Read more
| Categories: Aster Data, Data warehouse appliances, MapReduce, Netezza, Parallelization, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, SAS Institute, Specific users, Teradata | 11 Comments |
Revolution Analytics seems very confused
Revolution Analytics is a relaunch of a company previously known as REvolution Computing, built around the open source R language. Last week they sent around email claiming they were a new company (false), and asking for briefings in connection with an embargo this morning. I talked to Revolution Analytics yesterday, and they told me the embargo had been moved to Thursday.* However, Revolution apparently neglected to tell the press the same thing, and there’s an article out today — quoting me, because I’d given quotes in line with the original embargo, before I’d had the briefing myself. And what’s all this botched timing about? Mainly, it seems to be for a “statement of direction” about software Revolution Analytics hasn’t actually developed yet.
*More precisely, they spoke as if the embargo had been Thursday all along.
| Categories: Investment research and trading, Parallelization, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, Revolution Analytics, SAS Institute | 13 Comments |
Vertica update
Last month, Vertica’s CEO Ralph Breslauer quit,* and Vertica made it sound like there would be a new CEO late in April. And indeed, as of April 29, there was. He’s a guy I’ve never heard of before named Chris Lynch, apparently quite the sales machine builder. The most substance I’ve found is a pair of Mass High Tech articles — the latter exceedingly typo-ridden — to the general effect that:
- Vertica plans to build a massive, world-conquering sales force.
- If Vertica dips back into negative cash flow to do that and has to raise more venture capital, so be it.
- “Triple-digit” revenue growth is expected for this year.
I’ll be speaking in Washington, DC on May 6
My clients at Aster Data are putting on a sequence of conferences called “Big Data Summit(s)”, and wanted me to keynote one. I agreed to the one in Washington, DC, on May 6, on the condition that I would be allowed to start with the same liberty and privacy themes I started my New England Database Summit keynote with. Since I already knew Aster to be one of the multiple companies in this industry that is responsibly concerned about the liberty and privacy threats we’re all helping cause, I expected them to agree to that condition immediately, and indeed they did.
On a rough-draft basis, my talk concept is:
Implications of New Analytic Technology in four areas:
- Liberty & privacy
- Data acquisition & retention
- Data exploration
- Operationalized analytics
I haven’t done any work yet on the talk besides coming up with that snippet, and probably won’t until the week before I give it. Suggestions are welcome.
If anybody actually has a link to a clear discussion of legislative and regulatory data retention requirements, that would be cool. I know they’ve exploded, but I don’t have the details.