Predictive modeling and advanced analytics

Discussion of technologies and vendors in the overlapping areas of predictive analytics, predictive modeling, data mining, machine learning, Monte Carlo analysis, and other “advanced” analytics.

August 28, 2016

Are analytic RDBMS and data warehouse appliances obsolete?

I used to spend most of my time — blogging and consulting alike — on data warehouse appliances and analytic DBMS. Now I’m barely involved with them. The most obvious reason is that there have been drastic changes in industry structure:

Simply reciting all that, however, begs the question of whether one should still care about analytic RDBMS at all.

My answer, in a nutshell, is:

Analytic RDBMS — whether on premises in software, in the form of data warehouse appliances, or in the cloud — are still great for hard-core business intelligence, where “hard-core” can refer to ad-hoc query complexity, reporting/dashboard concurrency, or both. But they aren’t good for much else.

Read more

August 21, 2016

More about Databricks and Spark

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi checked in because he disagreed with part of my recent post about Databricks. Ali’s take on Databricks’ position in the Spark world includes:

Ali also walked me through customer use cases and adoption in wonderful detail. In general:

The story on those sectors, per Ali, is:  Read more

July 31, 2016

Notes on Spark and Databricks — technology

During my recent visit to Databricks, I of course talked a lot about technology — largely with Reynold Xin, but a bit with Ion Stoica as well. Spark 2.0 is just coming out now, and of course has a lot of enhancements. At a high level:

The majority of Databricks’ development efforts, however, are specific to its cloud service, rather than being donated to Apache for the Spark project. Some of the details are NDA, but it seems fair to mention at least:

Two of the technical initiatives Reynold told me about seemed particularly cool. Read more

July 31, 2016

Notes on Spark and Databricks — generalities

I visited Databricks in early July to chat with Ion Stoica and Reynold Xin. Spark also comes up in a large fraction of the conversations I have. So let’s do some catch-up on Databricks and Spark. In a nutshell:

I shall explain below. I also am posting separately about Spark evolution, especially Spark 2.0. I’ll also talk a bit in that post about Databricks’ proprietary/closed-source technology.

Spark is the replacement for Hadoop MapReduce.

This point is so obvious that I don’t know what to say in its support. The trend is happening, as originally decreed by Cloudera (and me), among others. People are rightly fed up with the limitations of MapReduce, and — niches perhaps aside — there are no serious alternatives other than Spark.

The greatest use for Spark seems to be the same as the canonical first use for MapReduce: data transformation. Also in line with the Spark/MapReduce analogy:  Read more

July 31, 2016

Terminology: Data scientists vs. data engineers

I learned some newish terms on my recent trip. They’re meant to solve the problem that “data scientists” used to be folks with remarkably broad skill sets, few of whom actually existed in ideal form. So instead now it is increasingly said that:

Related link

July 19, 2016

Notes from a long trip, July 19, 2016

For starters:

A running list of recent posts is:

Subjects I’d like to add to that list include:

Read more

June 5, 2016

Challenges in anomaly management

As I observed yet again last week, much of analytics is concerned with anomaly detection, analysis and response. I don’t think anybody understands the full consequences of that fact,* but let’s start with some basics.

*me included

An anomaly, for our purposes, is a data point or more likely a data aggregate that is notably different from the trend or norm. If I may oversimplify, there are three kinds of anomalies:

Two major considerations are:

What I mean by the latter point is:

Anyhow, the Holy Grail* of anomaly management is a system that sends the right alerts to the right people, and never sends them wrong ones. And the quest seems about as hard as that for the Holy Grail, although this one uses more venture capital and fewer horses. Read more

May 30, 2016

Adversarial analytics and other topics

Five years ago, in a taxonomy of analytic business benefits, I wrote:

A large fraction of all analytic efforts ultimately serve one or more of three purposes:

  • Marketing
  • Problem and anomaly detection and diagnosis
  • Planning and optimization

That continues to be true today. Now let’s add a bit of spin.

1. A large fraction of analytics is adversarial. In particular: Read more

February 15, 2016

Some checklists for making technical choices

Whenever somebody asks for my help on application technology strategy, I start by trying to ascertain three things. The absolute first is actually a prerequisite to almost any kind of useful conversation, which is to ascertain in general terms what the hell it is that we are talking about. 🙂

My second goal is to ascertain technology constraints. Three common types are:

That’s often a short and straightforward discussion, except in those awkward situations when all three of my bullet points above are applicable at once.

The third item is usually more interesting. I try to figure out what is to be accomplished. That’s usually not a simple matter, because the initial list of goals and requirements is almost never accurate. It’s actually more common that I have to tell somebody to be more ambitious than that I need to rein them in.

Commonly overlooked needs include:

And if you take one thing away from this post, then take this:

I guarantee it.

Read more

January 22, 2016

Cloudera in the cloud(s)

Cloudera released Version 2 of Cloudera Director, which is a companion product to Cloudera Manager focused specifically on the cloud. This led to a discussion about — you guessed it! — Cloudera and the cloud.

Making Cloudera run in the cloud has three major aspects:

Features new in this week’s release of Cloudera Director include:

I.e., we’re talking about some pretty basic/checklist kinds of things. Cloudera Director is evidently working for Amazon AWS and Google GCP, and planned for Windows Azure, VMware and OpenStack.

As for porting, let me start by noting: Read more

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