May 13, 2015

Notes on analytic technology, May 13, 2015

1. There are multiple ways in which analytics is inherently modular. For example:

Also, analytics is inherently iterative.

If I’m right that analytics is or at least should be modular and iterative, it’s easy to see why people hate multi-year data warehouse creation projects. Perhaps it’s also easy to see why I like the idea of schema-on-need.

2. In 2011, I wrote, in the context of agile predictive analytics, that

… the “business analyst” role should be expanded beyond BI and planning to include lightweight predictive analytics as well.

I gather that a similar point is at the heart of Gartner’s new term citizen data scientist. I am told that the term resonates with at least some enterprises.  Read more

October 26, 2014

Datameer at the time of Datameer 5.0

Datameer checked in, having recently announced general availability of Datameer 5.0. So far as I understood, Datameer is still clearly in the investigative analytics business, in that:

Key aspects include:

Read more

August 14, 2014

“Freeing business analysts from IT”

Many of the companies I talk with boast of freeing business analysts from reliance on IT. This, to put it mildly, is not a unique value proposition. As I wrote in 2012, when I went on a history of analytics posting kick,

  • Most interesting analytic software has been adopted first and foremost at the departmental level.
  • People seem to be forgetting that fact.

In particular, I would argue that the following analytic technologies started and prospered largely through departmental adoption:

  • Fourth-generation languages (the analytically-focused ones, which in fact started out being consumed on a remote/time-sharing basis)
  • Electronic spreadsheets
  • 1990s-era business intelligence
  • Dashboards
  • Fancy-visualization business intelligence
  • Planning/budgeting
  • Predictive analytics
  • Text analytics
  • Rules engines

What brings me back to the topic is conversations I had this week with Paxata and Metanautix. The Paxata story starts:

Metanautix seems to aspire to a more complete full-analytic-stack-without-IT kind of story, but clearly sees the data preparation part as a big part of its value.

If there’s anything new about such stories, it has to be on the transformation side; BI tools have been helping with data extraction since — well, since the dawn of BI. Read more

August 6, 2013

Hortonworks, Hadoop, Stinger and Hive

I chatted yesterday with the Hortonworks gang. The main subject was Hortonworks’ approach to SQL-on-Hadoop — commonly called Stinger —  but at my request we cycled through a bunch of other topics as well. Company-specific notes include:

Our deployment and use case discussions were a little confused, because a key part of Hortonworks’ strategy is to support and encourage the idea of combining use cases and workloads on a single cluster. But I did hear:

*By the way — Teradata seems serious about pushing the UDA as a core message.

Ecosystem notes, in Hortonworks’ perception, included:

I also asked specifically about OpenStack. Hortonworks is a member of the OpenStack project, contributes nontrivially to Swift and other subprojects, and sees Rackspace as an important partner. But despite all that, I think strong Hadoop/OpenStack integration is something for the indefinite future.

Hortonworks’ views about Hadoop 2.0 start from the premise that its goal is to support running a multitude of workloads on a single cluster. (See, for example, what I previously posted about Tez and YARN.) Timing notes for Hadoop 2.0 include:

Frankly, I think Cloudera’s earlier and necessarily incremental Hadoop 2 rollout was a better choice than Hortonworks’ later big bang, even though the core-mission aspect of Hadoop 2.0 is what was least ready. HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) performance, NameNode failover and so on were well worth having, and it’s more than a year between Cloudera starting supporting them and when Hortonworks is offering Hadoop 2.0.

Hortonworks’ approach to doing SQL-on-Hadoop can be summarized simply as “Make Hive into as good an analytic RDBMS as possible, all in open source”. Key elements include:  Read more

June 23, 2013

Hadoop news and rumors, June 23, 2013

Cloudera

*Of course, there will always be exceptions. E.g., some formats can be updated on a short-request basis, while others can only be written to via batch conversions.

Everybody else

July 24, 2012

Notes on Datameer

In a short October, 2011 post about Datameer, I wrote:

Datameer is designed to let you do simple stuff on large amounts of data, where “large amounts of data” typically means data in Hadoop, and “simple stuff” includes basic versions of a spreadsheet, of BI, and of EtL (Extract/Transform/Load, without much in the way of T).

That’s all still mainly true, although with the recent Datameer 2.0:

In essence, Datameer has two positionings.

Read more

October 25, 2011

Where Datameer is positioned

I’ve chatted with Datameer a couple of times recently, mainly with CEO Stefan Groschupf, most recently after XLDB last Tuesday. Nothing I learned greatly contradicts what I wrote about Datameer 1 1/2 years ago.  In a nutshell, Datameer is designed to let you do simple stuff on large amounts of data, where “large amounts of data” typically means data in Hadoop, and “simple stuff” includes basic versions of a spreadsheet, of BI, and of EtL (Extract/Transform/Load, without much in the way of T).

Stefan reports that these capabilities are appealing to a significant fraction of enterprise or other commercial Hadoop users, especially the EtL and the BI. I don’t doubt him.

April 16, 2010

Introduction to Datameer

Elder care issues have flared up with a vengeance, so I’m not going to be blogging much for a while, and surely not at any length. That said, my first post about Datameer was never going to be very long, so lets get right to it:

Feed: DBMS (database management system), DW (data warehousing), BI (business intelligence), and analytics technology Subscribe to the Monash Research feed via RSS or email:

Login

Search our blogs and white papers

Monash Research blogs

User consulting

Building a short list? Refining your strategic plan? We can help.

Vendor advisory

We tell vendors what's happening -- and, more important, what they should do about it.

Monash Research highlights

Learn about white papers, webcasts, and blog highlights, by RSS or email.