Investigative analytics: Slide deck and March 10 webinar
As previously noted, I’m doing a webinar on investigative analytics on Thursday, March 10, at 2 pm Eastern time. I’ve now uploaded a late-draft slide deck for same. It’s pretty concise; the deck is in no way a substitute for the webinar itself, which I urge you to attend (or catch a recording of after-the-fact). But the slides — and in a couple of cases comments below them — may add some value to the definition of investigative analytics I recently posted.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Presentations | 4 Comments |
Three ways Fedex is a metaphor for data integration
It occurs to me that there are three reasons why Federal Express, aka Fedex, is a great metaphor for data integration. Read more
Teradata, Aster Data, and Teradata/Aster
Teradata is acquiring Aster Data. Naturally, the deal is being presented with a Treaty of Tordesillas kind of positioning — Teradata does X, Aster Data does Y, and everybody looks forward to having X and Y in the same product portfolio. That said, my initial positioning and product strategy thoughts on the Teradata/Aster combination go something like this. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Aster Data, Columnar database management, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, RDF and graphs, Specific users, Teradata | 9 Comments |
Terminology: Investigative analytics
In my post on the six useful things you can do with analytic technology, one of the six was
Research, investigate, and analyze in support of future decisions.
I’m calling that investigative analytics, and am hopeful the term will catch on.
I went on to say that the term conflated several disciplines, namely:
- Statistics, data mining, machine learning, and/or predictive analytics. …
- The more research-oriented aspects of business intelligence tools. …
- Analogous technologies as applied to non-tabular data types such as text or graph.
By way of contrast, I don’t regard business activity monitoring (BAM) or other kinds of monitoring-oriented business intelligence (BI) as part of “investigative analytics,” because they don’t seem particularly investigative.
Based on the above, I propose the following simple definition of the investigative analytics activity or process:
Seeking (previously unknown) patterns in data.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence | 22 Comments |
How about “Short Request Processing”?
While my other terminology posts seem to have gone pretty well, the Internet Request Processing name is proving a bit problematic. People seem pretty cool with the “request processing” part, but there are issues with the modifier, including:
- “Internet” doesn’t really cover everything.
- “Network” in practice sounds too low-level, and is also too general.
- “Online” is also too general.
So how about just going with “short”? OLTP requests are inherently short. “GET” and “SET” are certainly short. 🙂 In general, queries that do not involve JOINs are probably short requests. Analytic queries, however, are generally not short. Even better, all that can apply to the syntax and the execution time alike. 🙂
Please note that I’m focused more here on describing use cases than products. Whether products generally used to do one kind of thing can also be stretched to do another — e.g., complex analytics hardwired into a Cassandra application — is not my primary concern.
| Categories: NoSQL, OLTP | 11 Comments |