EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT

Analysis of data integration products and technologies, especially ones related to data warehousing, such as ELT (Extract/Transform/Load). Related subjects include:

January 14, 2016

BI and quasi-DBMS

I’m on two overlapping posting kicks, namely “lessons from the past” and “stuff I keep saying so might as well also write down”. My recent piece on Oracle as the new IBM is an example of both themes. In this post, another example, I’d like to memorialize some points I keep making about business intelligence and other analytics. In particular:

Similarly, BI has often been tied to data integration/ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) functionality.* But I won’t address that subject further at this time.

*In the Hadoop/Spark era, that’s even truer of other analytics than it is of BI.

My top historical examples include:

Read more

November 19, 2015

The questionably named Cloudera Navigator Optimizer

I only have mixed success at getting my clients to reach out to me for messaging advice when they’re introducing something new. Cloudera Navigator Optimizer, which is being announced along with Cloudera 5.5, is one of my failures in that respect; I heard about it for the first time Tuesday afternoon. I hate the name. I hate some of the slides I saw. But I do like one part of the messaging, namely the statement that this is about “refactoring” queries.

All messaging quibbles aside, I think the Cloudera Navigator Optimizer story is actually pretty interesting, and perhaps not just to users of SQL-on-Hadoop technologies such as Hive (which I guess I’d put in that category for simplicity) or Impala. As I understand Cloudera Navigator Optimizer:

Read more

September 10, 2015

MongoDB update

One pleasure in talking with my clients at MongoDB is that few things are NDA. So let’s start with some numbers:

Also >530 staff, and I think that number is a little out of date.

MongoDB lacks many capabilities RDBMS users take for granted. MongoDB 3.2, which I gather is slated for early November, narrows that gap, but only by a little. Features include:

There’s also a closed-source database introspection tool coming, currently codenamed MongoDB Scout.  Read more

August 3, 2015

Data messes

A lot of what I hear and talk about boils down to “data is a mess”. Below is a very partial list of examples.

To a first approximation, one would expect operational data to be rather clean. After all, it drives and/or records business transactions. So if something goes awry, the result can be lost money, disappointed customers, or worse, and those are outcomes to be strenuously avoided. Up to a point, that’s indeed true, at least at businesses large enough to be properly automated. (Unlike, for example — 🙂 — mine.)

Even so, operational data has some canonical problems. First, it could be inaccurate; somebody can just misspell or otherwise botch an entry. Further, there are multiple ways data can be unreachable, typically because it’s:

Inconsistency can take multiple forms, including:  Read more

July 7, 2015

Zoomdata and the Vs

Let’s start with some terminology biases:

So when my clients at Zoomdata told me that they’re in the business of providing “the fastest visual analytics for big data”, I understood their choice, but rolled my eyes anyway. And then I immediately started to check how their strategy actually plays against the “big data” Vs.

It turns out that:

*The HDFS/S3 aspect seems to be a major part of Zoomdata’s current story.

Core aspects of Zoomdata’s technical strategy include:  Read more

June 10, 2015

Hadoop generalities

Occasionally I talk with an astute reporter — there are still a few left 🙂 — and get led toward angles I hadn’t considered before, or at least hadn’t written up. A blog post may then ensue. This is one such post.

There is a group of questions going around that includes:

To a first approximation, my responses are:  Read more

March 23, 2015

A new logical data layer?

I’m skeptical of data federation. I’m skeptical of all-things-to-all-people claims about logical data layers, and in particular of Gartner’s years-premature “Logical Data Warehouse” buzzphrase. Still, a reasonable number of my clients are stealthily trying to do some kind of data layer middleware, as are other vendors more openly, and I don’t think they’re all crazy.

Here are some thoughts as to why, and also as to challenges that need to be overcome.

There are many things a logical data layer might be trying to facilitate — writing, querying, batch data integration, real-time data integration and more. That said:

Read more

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 5, 2015

Cask and CDAP

For starters:

Also:

So far as I can tell:

Read more

February 28, 2015

Databricks and Spark update

I chatted last night with Ion Stoica, CEO of my client Databricks, for an update both on his company and Spark. Databricks’ actual business is Databricks Cloud, about which I can say:

I do not expect all of the above to remain true as Databricks Cloud matures.

Ion also said that Databricks is over 50 people, and has moved its office from Berkeley to San Francisco. He also offered some Spark numbers, such as: Read more

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