Thinking about market segments
It is a reasonable (over)simplification to say that my business boils down to: Advising vendors what/how to sell. Advising users what/how to buy. One complication that commonly creeps in is that...
View ArticleCool analytic stories
There are several reasons it’s hard to confirm great analytic user stories. First, there aren’t as many jaw-dropping use cases as one might think. For as I wrote about performance, new technology tends...
View ArticleQuick-turnaround predictive modeling
Last November, I wrote two posts on agile predictive analytics. It’s time to return to the subject. I’m used to KXEN talking about the ability to do predictive modeling, very quickly, perhaps without...
View ArticleIntroduction to MemSQL
I talked with MemSQL shortly before today’s launch. MemSQL technology basics are: In-memory relational DBMS. Being released single-box only. Transparent sharding is under development for release in the...
View ArticleIntroduction to Yarcdata
Cray’s strategy these days seems to be: Move forward with the classic supercomputer business. Diversify into related areas. At the moment, the main diversifications are: Boxes that are like...
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Issues in regulatory compliance
From time to time, I hear of regulatory requirements to retain, analyze, and/or protect data in various ways. It’s hard to get a comprehensive picture of these, as they vary both by industry and...
View ArticleSome Vertica 6 features
Vertica 6 was recently announced, and so it seemed like a good time to catch up on Vertica features. The main topics I want to address are: External tables and the associated new Hadoop connector....
View ArticleNotes on Hadoop adoption
I successfully resisted telephone consulting while on vacation, but I did do some by email. One was on the oft-recurring subject of Hadoop adoption. I think it’s OK to adapt some of that into a post....
View ArticleNotes on Hadoop adoption and trends
With Strata/Hadoop World being next week, there is much Hadoop discussion. One theme of the season is BI over Hadoop. I have at least 5 clients claiming they’re uniquely positioned to support that...
View ArticleThe future of dashboards, if any
Business intelligence dashboards are frequently bashed. I slammed them back in 2006 and 2007. Mark Smith dropped the hammer last August. EIS, the most dashboard-like pre-1990s analytic technology, was...
View ArticleAttack of the Frankenschemas
In typical debates, the extremists on both sides are wrong. “SQL vs. NoSQL” is an example of that rule. For many traditional categories of database or application, it is reasonable to say: Relational...
View ArticleIt’s hard to make data easy to analyze
It’s hard to make data easy to analyze. While everybody seems to realize this — a few marketeers perhaps aside — some remarks might be useful even so. Many different technologies purport to make data...
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Some notes on new-era data management, March 31, 2013
Hmm. I probably should have broken this out as three posts rather than one after all. Sorry about that. Performance confusion Discussions of DBMS performance are always odd, for starters because:...
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MemSQL scales out
The third of my three MySQL-oriented clients I alluded to yesterday is MemSQL. When I wrote about MemSQL last June, the product was an in-memory single-server MySQL workalike. Now scale-out has been...
View ArticleAnalytic application themes
I talk with a lot of companies, and repeatedly hear some of the same application themes. This post is my attempt to collect some of those ideas in one place. 1. So far, the buzzword of the year is...
View ArticleSome stuff I’m thinking about (early 2014)
From time to time I like to do “what I’m working on” posts. From my recent blogging, you probably already know that includes: Hadoop (always, and please see below). Analytic RDBMS (ditto). NoSQL and...
View ArticleDBMS2 revisited
The name of this blog comes from an August, 2005 column. 8 1/2 years later, that analysis holds up pretty well. Indeed, I’d keep the first two precepts exactly as I proposed back then: Task-appropriate...
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Notes and comments, May 6, 2014
After visiting California recently, I made a flurry of posts, several of which generated considerable discussion. My claim that Spark will replace Hadoop MapReduce got much Twitter attention —...
View ArticleData as an asset
We all tend to assume that data is a great and glorious asset. How solid is this assumption? Yes, data is one of the most proprietary assets an enterprise can have. Any of the Goldman Sachs big three*...
View ArticleNotes 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...
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