Business intelligence

Analysis of companies, products, and user strategies in the area of business intelligence. Related subjects include:

March 15, 2015

BI for NoSQL — some very early comments

Over the past couple years, there have been various quick comments and vague press releases about “BI for NoSQL”. I’ve had trouble, however, imagining what it could amount to that was particularly interesting, with my confusion boiling down to “Just what are you aggregating over what?” Recently I raised the subject with a few leading NoSQL companies. The result is that my confusion was expanded. 🙂 Here’s the small amount that I have actually figured out.

As I noted in a recent post about data models, many databases — in particular SQL and NoSQL ones — can be viewed as collections of <name, value> pairs.

Consequently, a NoSQL database can often be viewed as a table or a collection of tables, except that:

That’s all straightforward to deal with if you’re willing to write scripts to extract the NoSQL data and transform or aggregate it as needed. But things get tricky when you try to insist on some kind of point-and-click. And by the way, that last comment pertains to BI and ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) alike. Indeed, multiple people I talked with on this subject conflated BI and ETL, and they were probably right to do so.

Read more

March 10, 2015

Some stuff on my mind, March 10, 2015

I found yesterday’s news quite unpleasant.

And by the way, a guy died a few day ago snorkeling at the same resort I like to go to, evidently doing less risky things than I on occasion have.

So I want to unclutter my mind a bit. Here goes.

1. There are a couple of stories involving Sam Simon and me that are too juvenile to tell on myself, even now. But I’ll say that I ran for senior class president, in a high school where the main way to campaign was via a single large poster, against a guy with enough cartoon-drawing talent to be one of the creators of the Simpsons. Oops.

2. If one suffers from ulcerative colitis as my mother did, one is at high risk of getting colon cancer, as she also did. Mine isn’t as bad as hers was, due to better tolerance for medication controlling the disease. Still, I’ve already had a double-digit number of colonoscopies in my life. They’re not fun. I need another one soon; in fact, I canceled one due to the blizzards.

Pro-tip — never, ever have a colonoscopy without some kind of anesthesia or sedation. Besides the unpleasantness, the lack of meds increases the risk that the colonoscopy will tear you open and make things worse. I learned that the hard way in New York in the early 1980s.

3. Five years ago I wrote optimistically about the evolution of the information ecosystem, specifically using the example of the IT sector. One could argue that I was right. After all:  Read more

January 19, 2015

Where the innovation is

I hoped to write a reasonable overview of current- to medium-term future IT innovation. Yeah, right. 🙂 But if we abandon any hope that this post could be comprehensive, I can at least say:

1. Back in 2011, I ranted against the term Big Data, but expressed more fondness for the V words — Volume, Velocity, Variety and Variability. That said, when it comes to data management and movement, solutions to the V problems have generally been sketched out.

2. Even so, there’s much room for innovation around data movement and management. I’d start with:

3. As I suggested last year, data transformation is an important area for innovation.  Read more

December 31, 2014

Notes on machine-generated data, year-end 2014

Most IT innovation these days is focused on machine-generated data (sometimes just called “machine data”), rather than human-generated. So as I find myself in the mood for another survey post, I can’t think of any better idea for a unifying theme.

1. There are many kinds of machine-generated data. Important categories include:

That’s far from a complete list, but if you think about those categories you’ll probably capture most of the issues surrounding other kinds of machine-generated data as well.

2. Technology for better information and analysis is also technology for privacy intrusion. Public awareness of privacy issues is focused in a few areas, mainly: Read more

December 12, 2014

Notes and links, December 12, 2014

1. A couple years ago I wrote skeptically about integrating predictive modeling and business intelligence. I’m less skeptical now.

For starters:

I’ve also heard a couple of ideas about how predictive modeling can support BI. One is via my client Omer Trajman, whose startup ScalingData is still semi-stealthy, but says they’re “working at the intersection of big data and IT operations”. The idea goes something like this:

Makes sense to me. (Edit: ScalingData subsequently launched, under the name Rocana.)

* The word “cluster” could have been used here in a couple of different ways, so I decided to avoid it altogether.

Finally, I’m hearing a variety of “smart ETL/data preparation” and “we recommend what columns you should join” stories. I don’t know how much machine learning there’s been in those to date, but it’s usually at least on the roadmap to make the systems (yet) smarter in the future. The end benefit is usually to facilitate BI.

2. Discussion of graph DBMS can get confusing. For example: Read more

November 15, 2014

Technical differentiation

I commonly write about real or apparent technical differentiation, in a broad variety of domains. But actually, computers only do a couple of kinds of things:

And hence almost all IT product differentiation fits into two buckets:

As examples of this reductionism, please consider:

Similar stories are true about application software, or about anything that has an API (Application Programming Interface) or SDK (Software Development Kit).

Yes, all my examples are in software. That’s what I focus on. If I wanted to be more balanced in including hardware or data centers, I might phrase the discussion a little differently — but the core points would still remain true.

What I’ve said so far should make more sense if we combine it with the observation that differentiation is usually restricted to particular domains. 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

September 28, 2014

Some stuff on my mind, September 28, 2014

1. I wish I had some good, practical ideas about how to make a political difference around privacy and surveillance. Nothing else we discuss here is remotely as important. I presumably can contribute an opinion piece to, more or less, the technology publication(s) of my choice; that can have a small bit of impact. But I’d love to do better than that. Ideas, anybody?

2. A few thoughts on cloud, colocation, etc.:

3. As for the analytic DBMS industry: Read more

September 7, 2014

An idealized log management and analysis system — from whom?

I’ve talked with many companies recently that believe they are:

At best, I think such competitive claims are overwrought. Still, it’s a genuinely important subject and opportunity, so let’s consider what a great log management and analysis system might look like.

Much of this discussion could apply to machine-generated data in general. But right now I think more players are doing product management with an explicit conception either of log management or event-series analytics, so for this post I’ll share that focus too.

A short answer might be “Splunk, but with more analytic functionality and more scalable performance, at lower cost, plus numerous coupons for free pizza.” A more constructive and bottoms-up approach might start with:  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

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