Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence

In this podcast, Dr. Barry Devlin founder and principal of 9sight Consulting and David Friedland, SVP and ‘Voracity’ platform lead at IRI, The CoSort Company continue their discussion of the Production Analytic Platform, an evolutionary platform that bridges the operational/informational divide that…
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In this podcast, Dr. Barry Devlin explains how the production analytic platform will evolve within enterprises. Key factors affecting the evolution are artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and analytics. The interview is conducted by Ron Powell, independent analyst and industry expert….
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In this podcast, Dr. Barry Devlin, founder and principal of 9sightAnalytics, discusses the complexities involved in analyzing time-dependent data, especially data from the Internet of Things. Ron Powell, independent analyst and industry expert, conducted the interview….
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Patrick Deglon, vice president for advanced analytics at Teradata R&D, shares how Teradata is moving from being a data warehouse company to an analytic platform provider, and he discusses the Teradata Analytics Platform. The most interesting aspect, for Patrick, is autonomous decision making, an…
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In this podcast, Barry Devlin, founder and principal of 9SightAnalytics, discusses time-series data, which enterprises collect from sensor and IoT data, and explains why this data requires a production analytic platform that marries operations and analytics. Ron Powell, independent analyst and indus…
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In this podcast, Donald Farmer, principal of TreeHive Strategy, and Ron Powell, independent analyst and industry expert for the BeyeNETWORK and executive producer of The World Transformed FastForward Series, discuss how the evolution of business intelligence presents some unique challenges for today…
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The importance of having a proper architecture for analytics is the topic of this podcast. Dr. Barry Devlin, founder and principal for 9Sight Consulting, explains the new production analytic platform that will meet the current operational and informational needs of today’s enterprises. The interview…
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Aashu Virmani, chief marketing officer at Fuzzy Logix, provides background information on Fuzzy Logix as well as new projects on their horizon. He also explains indexed data management and how machine learning applies to anti-money laundering using decision trees, regression and neural nets. Ron Pow…
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One of the biggest changes facing organizations making purchasing and deployment decisions about analytic databases ” including relational data warehouses ” is whether to opt for a cloud solution. A couple of years ago, only a few ……
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See how organizations are adopting sophisticated analytics methods and are moving to hybrid data warehouse architectures….
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At the Gartner BI & Analytics Summit in Grapevine, Texas, Jim Slagle, Vice President of BI for Apria Healthcare, talks with Ron Powell, industry consultant and expert with the BeyeNETWORK and the Business Analytics Collaborative, about Apria Healthcare’s cloud BI initiative and how it exceeded…
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In this article, Rob Armstrong, data and analytic enthusiast for Teradata, talks with Ron Powell about The Analytics of Things and how companies can make data actionable….
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Perhaps you’ve discovered that your firstgeneration warehouse is constraining your business. Or you’ve already modernized your infrastructure but found the new warehouse inefficient. For example, some solutions deliver speedy ……
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Thousands of users rely on BI Office to turn their organizations into data-driven organizations. They are building code-free data models without IT support, answering complex questions with powerful analytics, designing intuitive ……
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With BI Office, organizations can deploy analytics across the enterprise for today’s BI needs. Organizations can unlock data and insights trapped in individual desktops where end users can conduct self-service analytics in an ……
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In an environment where data is the most critical natural resource, speed-of-thought insights from information and analytics are a critical competitive imperative. Organizations are counting on data to drive every decision, ……
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Introduce speed, value and simplicity to your analytics strategy. IBM PureData System for Analytics is a purpose-built data warehouse appliance that allows businesses to answer questions faster while reducing operational costs….
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Businesses depend more than ever on larger volumes of data to inform every aspect of day-to-day business activity. Yet many businesses operate at a disadvantage. Research shows the two greatest challenges facing data professionals ……
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Enterprise data warehouses remain as relevant as ever in today’s business environment. However, the traditional data warehouse is not up to the task with a flood of new data pouring in at an increasingly rapid pace. To maintain ……
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Please join me for my TDWI presentation. When: July 20th, 2016.  3:30 pm – 4:15 pm Where: TDWI Accellerate, Boston, The Westin Copy Place Registration and details Enabling Self-Service Analytics The Holy Grail of business intelligence has long been self-service analytics where busi…
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“An impact of the burgeoning business interest in analytics is increased interest among small and midsize businesses to adopt a business intelligence (BI), reporting, and analytics strategy. In the past, larger organizations may ……
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As the need to pull together the growing volumes of data that’s generated and collected by organizations has increased, several types of data integration software have emerged to help IT teams simplify and manage the process. But with so many products to choose from, what’s the best approach…
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The growing importance of business intelligence and data analytics applications in driving business decision making has made data integration’s vital role in the enterprise crystal clear. From gathering data, transforming it into useful information and delivering it to the business users or proc…
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Whether we’re discussing the impact that the tsunami of big data is having on organizations or the cloud application takeover of traditional on-premises applications, the common foundation of such trends is an increasing demand for data. More accurately, there is a need for data that has been in…
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Mark Budzinski, President of WhereScape, explains to Wayne Eckerson, founder and director of consulting at Eckerson Group, how data warehouse automation improves the building and managing of data warehouses of all types….
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Kiran Kamreddy, senior product marketing manager at Teradata, is interviewed by Wayne Eckerson, founder of Eckerson Group, a research and consulting company focused on business intelligence, analytics and big data. Kiran describes the cutting-edge products that fold into the Teradata portfolio for H…
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Rob Armstrong, data and analytic enthusiast, is interviewed by David Loshin of Knowledge Integrity. Rob explains that he focuses on getting data analytically ready in order to take action on it. He also emphasizes that big data is not another silo, but rather it needs to be integrated with the rest…
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Kiran Kamreddy, senior product marketing manager for the Hadoop portfolio at Teradata Labs, is interviewed by Ron Powell, independent analyst and industry expert focused on big data, business intelligence and data warehousing. Kiran discusses the Teradata Appliance for Hadoop, which is a powerful,…
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Bill Rand and PK Kannan of University of Maryland Smith School of Business, where they are professors in the marketing department specializing in marketing attribution, are interviewed by Wayne Eckerson of Eckerson Group, a research and consulting firm focused on business intelligence and analytics…
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Michael Upchurch, co-founder and chief operating officer of Fuzzy Logix, is interviewed by Ron Powell, independent analyst and industry expert focused on big data, business intelligence and data warehousing. Michael and Ron discuss the market sectors that are showing the greatest growth in the use o…
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On December 22, IBM announced the general availability of Cognos Analytics, a business intelligence (BI) software product that had been pre- announced in October 2015 at IBM’s Insight conference. The product has been in beta ……
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Jeff Tanner, Dean of Strome College of Business at Old Dominion University, is interviewed by Ron Powell, independent analyst and industry expert focused on big data, business intelligence and data warehousing. Jeff and Ron discuss how academia is responding to the growing demand for data scientists…
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The three decade old Data Warehouse is evolving into a Logical Data Warehouse architecture where new types forms of data require new technologies and cannot be forced into the data warehouse. Hadoop and other noSQL data stores are ……
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JoAnne McDougald, product marketing manager for RainStor and Hadoop at Teradata, is interviewed by Ron Powell, independent analyst and industry expert focused on big data, business intelligence and data warehousing. RainStor, acquired by Teradata in late 2014, is Teradata’s answer for archiving. Sh…
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John Thuma, director of Aster strategy and adoption at Teradata Aster, is interviewed by Wayne Eckerson of Eckerson Group, a research and consulting firm focused on business intelligence, big data and analytics. John talks about the recent announcement of Aster on Hadoop, and he explains the excitin…
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Dan Graham, director of technical marketing at Teradata, is interviewed by Wayne Eckerson, founder of Eckerson Group, a research and consulting firm focused on business intelligence, big data and analytics. Dan talks about the recent announcement of Teradata Listener, its origin, speed and ease of u…
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Nathan Stephens, director of solutions engineering at RStudio, is interviewed by Wayne Eckerson of Eckerson Group, a research and consulting firm focused on business intelligence and analytics. Nathan provides an overview of RStudio and its products for R….
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Satyen Sangani, CEO of Alation, is interviewed by Ron Powell, independent analyst and industry expert focused on big data, business intelligence and data warehousing. Satyen provides an overview of Alation and their product that he likens to a data catalog and explains the unique benefits their prod…
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Nancy Williams, vice president of DecisionPath Consulting, is interviewed by Ron Powell, independent analyst and industry expert focused on big data, business intelligence and data warehousing. Nancy relates how processes and organizations have not kept up with big data technology and what needs to…
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Blake Johnson, Consulting Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, is interviewed by Ron Powell, independent analyst and industry expert focused on big data, business intelligence and data warehousing. Blake enumerates the key findings of his recent studies focused on…
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Tom Villani, Vice President of Strategic Alliances and Business Development at Information Builders, is interviewed by Ron Powell, independent analyst and industry expert focused on big data, business intelligence and data warehousing. Tom explains how Information Builders addresses the four major i…
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Your company generates an enormous amount of data. Just the analogies to describe data capacities can overwhelm us. How much is “a lot” of data? Truckloads? Shiploads? Oceans of data? Millions of records, each hundreds or ……
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Eric Kierstead, Business Unit CIO for International for OHL, talks with Ron Powell, independent consultant and analyst, about how they have used self-service business intelligence to provide supply chain information to their customers….
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Sergio Carbone, CIO at Vree Health, talks with Ron Powell, independent consultant and analyst, about how their organization uses data and the iWay Product Suite from Information Builders….
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Banking Data Warehouse can play a central role in addressing the Principles on ‘risk data capabilities and risk reporting practices’ as laid down by the Basel Committee….
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Scott Franzel, Senior Vice President of IT at OFS Brands, talks with Ron Powell, independent consultant and analyst, about the company’s adoption and rollout of business intelligence….
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Your data warehouse is only as good as the data you load into it. But the data-loading process can be tricky, and there are ample opportunities to really mess it up if you don’t have the right experience. Here are a few that spring to mind: 1. Blindly change the ETL code Go ahead, play around wi…
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This is part of a three-post series on Kudu, a new data storage system from Cloudera. Part 1 is an overview of Kudu technology. Part 2 is a lengthy dive into how Kudu writes and reads data. Part 3 (this post) is a brief speculation as to Kudu’s eventual market significance. Combined with Imp…
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In this book excerpt published on SearchBusinessAnalytics.com, I write about why taking a siloed approach to creating a BI architecture framework leads to problems. The excerpt is from chapter 4 of my book Business Intelligence Guidebook: From Data Integration to Analytics.  In the chapter, I…
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Ryan Garrett, senior business development manager of field applications for Teradata Aster, talks with Ron Powell, independent consultant and analyst, about the benefits of analytics that calculate customer satisfaction scores across all touch points of a customer journey….
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In this article I wrote for SearchDataManagement.com, I discuss how business intelligence analytics tools can leverage data and convert it to actionable information that can benefit organizations. Understanding BI analytics tools and their benefits Enterprises are awash in data about their customers…
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One pleasure in talking with my clients at MongoDB is that few things are NDA. So let’s start with some numbers: >2,000 named customers, the vast majority of which are unique organizations who do business with MongoDB directly. ~75,000 users of MongoDB Cloud Manager. Estimated ~1/4 million…
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The Boston-based TDWI chapter is excited to present Mark Madsen, a thought-after speaker on all things BI, as our headline speaker for the September TDWI Boston meeting. Additionally, our own TDWI Boston chapter president Jens Meyer is presenting. When: Tuesday, September 15, 2015, 12noo…
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I’d say: Multi-model database management has been around for decades. Marketers who say otherwise are being ridiculous. Thus, “multi-model”-centric marketing is the last refuge of the incompetent. Vendors who say “We have a great DBMS, and by the way it’s multi-model (…
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It is extremely difficult to succeed with SaaS (Software as a Service) and packaged software in the same company. There were a few vendors who seemed to pull it off in the 1970s and 1980s, generally industry-specific application suite vendors. But it’s hard to think of more recent examples …
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IBM believes the Data Warehouse market continues to expand and adapt to address new requirements for user self-service, increased agility, requirements for new data types, lower cost solutions, adoption of open source, driving ……
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Let’s start with some terminology biases: I dislike the term “big data” but like the Vs that define it — Volume, Velocity, Variety and Variability. Though I think it’s silly, I understand why BI innovators flee from the term “business intelligence” (they…
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In which I observe that Tim Cook and the EFF, while thankfully on the right track, haven’t gone nearly far enough. Traditionally, the term “chilling effect” referred specifically to inhibitions on what in the US are regarded as First Amendment rights — the freedoms of speech,…
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At the highest level: Presto is, roughly speaking, Facebook’s replacement for Hive, at least for queries that are supposed to run at interactive speeds. Teradata is announcing support for Presto with a classic open source pricing model. Presto will also become, roughly speaking, Teradata’s replacem…
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It’s difficult to project the rate of IT change in health care, because: Health care is suffused with technology — IT, medical device and biotech alike — and hence has the potential for rapid change. However, it is also the case that … … health care is heavily bureaucr…
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1. There are multiple ways in which analytics is inherently modular. For example: Business intelligence tools can reasonably be viewed as application development tools. But the “applications” may be developed one report at a time. The point of a predictive modeling exercise may be to de…
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Big data does not spell extinction for the data warehouse. On the contrary, big data problems can be better addressed by an enhanced data warehouse. And big data technology can be used to modernize the warehouse. IBM has ……
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I’m going to be out-of-sorts this week, due to a colonoscopy. (Between the prep, the procedure, and the recovery, that’s a multi-day disablement.) In the interim, here’s a collection of links, quick comments and the like. 1. Are you an engineer considering a start-up? This post is…
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I hear much discussion of shortfalls in analytic technology, especially from companies that want to fill in the gaps. But how much do these gaps actually matter? In many cases, that depends on what the analytic technology is being used for. So let’s think about some different kinds of analytic…
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This 2H-2014 Value Matrix by Nucleus Research evaluates all major BI vendors and their ability to deliver value based on usability, functionality and projects 6-month trends for each vendor to identify best-of-breed capabilities ……
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The New York Times article “Learning to See Data ”  discusses novel ways of gleaning valuable insights from the deluge of data by presenting it visually. One of the ways involves working with an artist named Daniel Kohn. “Advanced computing produces waves of abstract digital data that in many…
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I’m a professor in my “spare” time, so I know how hard it is to find the time to create course materials. We have several resources available for professors and instructors at accredited colleges and universities who are using the Business Intelligence Guidebook in their courses. Syll…
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1. Continuing from last week’s HBase post, the Cloudera folks were fairly proud of HBase’s features for performance and scalability. Indeed, they suggested that use cases which were a good technical match for HBase were those that required fast random reads and writes with high concurren…
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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 o…
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For starters: Continuuity toured in 2012 and touted its “app server for Hadoop” technology. Continuuity recently changed its name to Cask and went open source. Cask’s product is now called CDAP (Cask Data Application Platform). It’s still basically an app server for Hadoop a…
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7-10 years ago, I repeatedly argued the viewpoints: Relational DBMS were the right choice in most cases. Multiple kinds of relational DBMS were needed, optimized for different kinds of use case. There were a variety of specialized use cases in which non-relational data models were best. Since then…
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IBM SPSS Modeler is a powerful, versatile data mining workbench that helps you gain unprecedented insight from your data. Its breadth and depth of techniques allows you to build predictive models easily, efficiently and rapidly, ……
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While I don’t find the Open Data Platform thing very significant, an associated piece of news seems cooler — Pivotal is open sourcing a bunch of software, with Greenplum as the crown jewel. Notes on that start: Greenplum has been an on-again/off-again low-cost player since before its ac…
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The other TDWI Boston chapter officers and I hope you will be able to carve out some time and attend one or more of our chapter meetings. To help you with your planning we have been able to lock in dates for all four of our upcoming chapter meetings as well as recruit top-level keynote-quality prese…
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In one of my favorite posts, namely When I am a VC Overlord, I wrote: I will not fund any entrepreneur who mentions “market projections” in other than ironic terms. Nobody who talks of market projections with a straight face should be trusted. Even so, I got talked today into putting on the record a…
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As mentioned in my post BI & Analytic Trends of 2015 – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, while the hyped industry trends get all the attention, there are many lesser-known trends that are have a significant impact on expanding the use and value of data and analytics. Although technology often gets…
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There is much confusion about migration, by which I mean applications or investment being moved from one “platform” technology — hardware, operating system, DBMS, Hadoop, appliance, cluster, cloud, etc. — to another. Let’s sort some of that out. For starters: There are…
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The term ‘Big Data’ is hard to escape these days as more and more enterprises begin to build out their analytic infrastructures, and more and more vendors start to pitch products to fulfill these needs. Gabriel Consulting – ……
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Kristin McInerney, senior healthcare industry consultant for Teradata, is interviewed by Ron Powell, independent analyst and consultant focused on big data, business intelligence and data warehousing. Kristin and Ron examine the changing healthcare industry, specifically healthcare provider communic…
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I ‘ve written several times to Santa while I have been working in the BI industry. Previously from a BI director’s, DW manager’s and enterprise data modeler’s perspectives. I’d like to say Santa answered some of these requests but those folks must have been naughty. The new list for Santa is fr…
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Marc Clark, director of cloud strategy with Teradata, is interviewed by Phil Bowermaster, independent analyst and consultant specializing in big data, analytics and data warehouse. Marc relates how the cloud is giving access to analytics to the next tier of users and the drivers that are pushing ana…
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Imad Birouty, director of Teradata product marketing, is interviewed by Ron Powell, independent analyst and consultant focused on big data, data warehousing and business intelligence. Imad and Ron discuss Teradata’s in-memory optimizations in pipelining, vectorization and data temperature. Imad also…
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John Evans, director of marketing for Kalido by Magnitude Software, is interviewed by Ron Powell, independent analyst and consultant focused on big data, business intelligence and data warehousing. John provides background information on Kalido’s acquisition by Magnitude Software, which was actually…
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Can big data technologies benefit your relational database and data warehouse environments? Imagine using big data technologies to enrich and optimize your beleaguered relational database (RDBMS) and data warehouse (DW) ……
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Join me for a DM Radio broadcast: Exaggerated Rumors? Will We Finally Put ETL to REST? When: December 11, 2014, 03:00PM ET Register The pervasive practice of Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) will almost assuredly never go away. However, a several corporate computing trends are challenging the predominan…
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Shelly Biggs, senior industry consultant for Teradata’s financial services division, is interviewed by John Myers, managing research director for business intelligence and data warehousing at Enterprise Management Associates. John and Shelly discuss the difficult market in financial services that i…
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Richard Winter, CEO and founder of WinterCorp, is interviewed by Ron Powell, independent analyst and consultant focused on big data, analytics, data warehousing and business intelligence. Richard describes the implications of variety with big data analytics….
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I’m taking a few weeks defocused from work, as a kind of grandpaternity leave. That said, the venue for my Dances of Infant Calming is a small-but-nice apartment in San Francisco, so a certain amount of thinking about tech industries is inevitable. I even found time last Tuesday to meet or speak wit…
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Rob Armstrong, director of Customer Briefing Team — a team that helps Teradata customers get value from their data, is interviewed by Lyndsay Wise, industry analyst and president of WiseAnalytics. Lyndsay and Rob discuss the characteristics of an intelligent business. Using customer examples, he ex…
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Bill Jacobs, vice president of product marketing for Revolution Analytics, is interviewed by Ron Powell, independent analyst and consultant focused on big data, business intelligence and data warehousing. Jeff explains R and why it’s significant for Teradata customers. He also tells about what Revol…
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Don Tirsell, vice president of worldwide technical alliances for Informatica, is interviewed by Ron Powell, independent analyst and consultant focusing on big data, data warehousing and business intelligence. Don and Ron discuss the longstanding Informatica/Teradata partnership and how Informatica…
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Andrew Bowles, vice president of business development for Ayasdi, is interviewed by Ron Powell, independent analyst and consultant focused on big data, analytics, business intelligence and data warehousing. Andrew talks about their recently announced strategic alliance with Teradata. He also explain…
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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: Accept instructions. Execute them. And hence almost all IT product differentiation fits into two buckets: Easier instruction-giving, wheth…
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Michael Upchurch, COO of Fuzzy Logix, is interviewed by Ron Powell, independent analyst and consultant working with big data, business intelligence and data warehousing. Michael and Ron talk about big data analytics and how companies can reap the benefits of an analytics implementation….
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Deborah Young, senior manager for professional services with Teradata, is interviewed by Phil Bowermaster, independent analyst and consultant specializing in big data, business intelligence and analytics. Debbi and Phil discuss the importance of having a data strategy. Because data is critical to ev…
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Following up on my notes on predictive modeling post from three weeks ago, I’d like to tackle some areas of recurring confusion. Why are we modeling? Ultimately, there are two reasons to model some aspect of your business: You generally want insight and understanding. This is analogous to wh…
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Michael Hiskey, chief product evangelist for analytics for MicroStrategy, is interviewed by Ron Powell, independent analyst and consultant focused on big data, business intelligence and data warehousing. Michael explains to Ron what MicroStrategy offerings provide the balance companies need to reach…
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In a world of big data and real-time information, organizations must deal with fast growing data volumes, demands for more sophisticated interpretations of data, and more rapid delivery of results. Check out the new ITG TCO ……
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It seems reasonable to wonder whether analytic data management is headed for the cloud. In no particular order: Amazon Redshift appears to be prospering. So are some SaaS (Software as a Service) business intelligence vendors. Amazon Elastic MapReduce is still around. Snowflake Computing launched wi…
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This week being Hadoop World, Cloudera naturally put out a flurry of press releases. In anticipation, I put out a context-setting post last weekend. That said, the gist of the news seems to be: Cloudera continued to improve various aspects of its product line, especially Impala with a Version 2.0….
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Discover how IBM SPSS Modeler Server’s combination of high performance, scalability, performance optimizations and flexible hardware requirements enable it to handle large and complex data mining projects….
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As planned, I’m getting more active in predictive modeling. Anyhow … 1. I still believe most of what I said in a July, 2013 predictive modeling catch-all post. However, I haven’t heard as much subsequently about Ayasdi as I had expected to. 2. The most controversial part of that po…
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This analyst written white paper compares two of the market leaders, IBM and Teradata, along with their competing products – IBM PureData System for Analytics, powered by Netezza technology and Teradata’s Data Warehouse Appliance ……
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Big data promises valuable insights that are enticing organizations to invest in analytics and BI tools. Yet many overlook the need for a DBMS that can stand up to the strain big data places on the underlying infrastructure. This ……
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Watch this webcast to learn how Pacesetters are using SaaS to provide their entire enterprise with a wide range of powerful benefits. SaaS can reduce costs, yes. But more than that, SaaS can engender rich and far reaching ……
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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…
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Hadoop is big with big data vendors — and some users, particularly Internet companies looking to collect and store large amounts of Web data. But in a video interview recorded at the 2014 TDWI BI Executive Summit in Boston, consultant Rick Sherman said organizations should make sure they have a rea…
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I’ve talked with many companies recently that believe they are: Focused on building a great data management and analytic stack for log management … … unlike all the other companies that might be saying the same thing … … and certainly unlike expensive, poorly-scalabl…
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I spent a day with Teradata in Rancho Bernardo last week. Most of what we discussed is confidential, but I think the non-confidential parts and my general impressions add up to enough for a post. First, let’s catch up with some personnel gossip. So far as I can tell: Scott Gnau runs most of T…
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SAP article: SAP sets the Guinness World Record with the World’s Largest Data Warehouse, a 12.1 Petabyte HANA environment….
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I have a small blacklist of companies I won’t talk with because of their particularly unethical past behavior. Actian is one such; they evidently made stuff up about me that Josh Berkus gullibly posted for them, and I don’t want to have conversations that could be dishonestly used agains…
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My client Teradata bought my (former) clients Revelytix and Hadapt.* Obviously, I’m in confidentiality up to my eyeballs. That said — Teradata truly doesn’t know what it’s going to do with those acquisitions yet. Indeed, the acquisitions are too new for Teradata to have fully…
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A significant fraction of IT professional services industry revenue comes from data integration. But as a software business, data integration has been more problematic. Informatica, the largest independent data integration software vendor, does $1 billion in revenue. INFA’s enterprise value (m…
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Learn how Cognos Scorecarding helps you translate strategies and tactics into specific, measurable objectives that link corporate strategy to operations….
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Oracle is announcing today what it’s calling “Oracle Big Data SQL”. As usual, I haven’t been briefed, but highlights seem to include: Oracle Big Data SQL is basically data federation using the External Tables capability of the Oracle DBMS. Unlike independent products —…
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As part of my series on the keys to and likelihood of success, I’d like to consider some historical examples in various categories of data management. A number of independent mainframe-based pre-relational DBMS vendors “crossed the chasm”, but none achieved anything resembling mark…
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Most organizations today are either considering or have already adopted at least one Cloud service. Due to its many benefits, such as speed, flexibility and cost effectiveness, SaaS is the fastest growing sector in today’s ……
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I’m commonly asked to assess vendor claims of the kind: “Our system lets you do multiple kinds of processing against one database.” “Otherwise you’d need two or more data managers to get the job done, which would be a catastrophe of unthinkable proportion.” So I…
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The pessimist thinks the glass is half-empty. The optimist thinks the glass is half-full. The engineer thinks the glass was poorly designed. Most of what I wrote in Part 1 of this post was already true 15 years ago. But much gets added in the modern era, considering that: Clusters will have node hi…
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This article from Rathin Das explains why data scientists, who are highly data savvy, need self-service analytics environments rather than BI solutions to perform predictive analytics in a flexible, effective manner….
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CIOs are expressing a concern about shadow IT in the “2014 State of the CIO Survey,” CIO Magazine, January 2014. Approximately half feel it is a constant problem and 40% believe it is on the increase. Data shadow systems have been prevalent for years at most companies, so why are the CIOs noticing n…
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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 — including some high-profile endorsements — and also some responses here. My MemSQL post led to…
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Big SQL, with its introduction, opened up Hadoop data to SQL access, relational database optimizations and runtime performance. The next version of Big SQL represents a quantum leap in SQL support and performance by removing the ……
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If you are evaluating whether Cloud could be an option for your next data mart or data warehouse project, join us to learn how IBM BLU Acceleration for Cloud, IBM Watson Foundations’ data warehouse solution on Cloud, provides ……
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My California trip last week focused mainly on software — duh! — but I had some interesting hardware/storage/architecture discussions as well, especially in the areas of: Rack- or data-center-scale systems. The real or imagined demise of Moore’s Law. Flash. I also got updated as to typ…
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Ron Powell,independent consultant/analyst and BeyeNETWORK expert, talks with Neil Buchwalter about ERwin’s latest release, particularly the metadata exchange bridges that go out to big data sources, which are primarily managed in Apache Hadoop Hive and Google BigQuery, and bring that information int…
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Neil Buchwalter, senior principal product manager for ERwin, talks with Ron Powell, independent consultant/analyst and BeyeNETWORK expert, about data modeling and big data….
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When I’m asked to talk to academics, the requested subject is usually a version of “What should we know about what’s happening in the actual market/real world?” I then try to figure out what the scholars could stand to hear that they perhaps don’t already know. In the c…
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I caught up with my clients at MongoDB to discuss the recent MongoDB 2.6, along with some new statements of direction. The biggest takeaway is that the MongoDB product, along with the associated MMS (MongoDB Management Service), is growing up. Aspects include: An actual automation and management us…
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Traditional business intelligence typically delivers answers to a set of known questions while data discovery and visual analytics focuses on drawing inferences and conclusions from data….
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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 data managers. Much of this blog is about task-appropriate data stores, so I won’t sa…
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Dr. Barquin provides an interesting perspective on social network analysis by looking at Paul Revere’s “connections.”……
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I have ever more business-advice posts up on Strategic Messaging. Recent subjects include pricing and stealth-mode marketing. Other stuff I’ve been up to includes: The Spark buzz keeps increasing; almost everybody I talk with expects Spark to win big, probably across several use cases. Disclos…
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Some technical background about Splunk In an October, 2009 technical introduction to Splunk, I wrote (emphasis added): Splunk software both reads logs and indexes them. The same code runs both on the nodes that do the indexing and on machines that simply emit logs. It turns out that the bolded part…
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For quite some time, one of the most frequent marketing pitches I’ve heard is “Analytics made easy for everybody!”, where by “quite some time” I mean “over 30 years”. “Uniquely easy analytics” is a claim that I meet with the greatest of skepticis…
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A couple of points that arise frequently in conversation, but that I don’t seem to have made clearly online. “Metadata” is generally defined as “data about data”. That’s basically correct, but it’s easy to forget how many different kinds of metadata there ar…
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Ron Powell, independent consultant/analyst and BeyeNETWORK expert, talks with Sharon Odom and Su Rayburn of Delta Community Credit Union about how they built a second-generation data warehouse with WhereScape….
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Ever more products try to integrate SQL with Hadoop, and discussions of them seem confused, in line with Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics. So let’s draw some distinctions, starting with (and these overlap): Are the SQL engine and Hadoop: Necessarily on the same cluster? Neces…
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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 NewSQL. Specifically, SQL-on-Hadoop Schema-on-need. Spark and other memory-centric…
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This post is part of a series on trends that may have been around for years without many enterprises successfully implementing them, or they might be emerging trends. Either way, they are what enterprises should do if they want to get the best business value from their existing or new BI investments…
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Is there still a need for the data warehouse? In this excerpt from his new book, Barry Devlin looks at why the data warehouse can no longer retain its old role of being all things to all informational needs….
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Dr. Barquin provides a glimpse into the activities of human rights violators who censor social media data and explains what opportunities this presents for BI and analytics professionals….
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It took me a bit of time, and an extra call with Vertica’s long-time R&D chief Shilpa Lawande, but I think I have a decent handle now on Vertica 7, code-named Crane. The two aspects of Vertica 7 I find most interesting are: Flex Zone, a schema-on-need technology very much like Hadapt̵…
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Philip Howard of Bloor Research compares performance capabilities of the leading business intelligence platforms. Companies studied in this comparison are IBM® (Cognos, DB2 with BLU Acceleration), SAP (BusinessObjects, HANA), ……
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In this interview by Claudia Imhoff, President of Intelligent Solutions and founder of the Boulder BI Brain Trust, James Taylor, CEO of Decision Management Solutions, talks about how big data has changed operational analytics….
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In this article, Dr. Barquin emphasizes the importance of properly trained BI professionals, especially in government agencies. He describes a program for addressing the basic needs of a new practitioner….
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Sam Tawfik, Marketing Manager at Teradata, talks with Ron Powell, independent consultant/analyst and BeyeNETWORK expert, about the Teradata OLAP Connector, which offers a new way for business users to access data without having to extract and store the data in their BI tool….
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Saurabh Jain explains why business intelligence and analytics initiatives need to evolve in order to achieve better business performance….
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Relational DBMS used to be fairly straightforward product suites, which boiled down to: A big SQL interpreter. A bunch of administrative and operational tools. Some very optional add-ons, often including an application development tool. Now, however, most RDBMS are sold as part of something bigger…
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Gertjan Vlug, CEO of BIReady, and Ron Powell, independent consultant/analyst and BeyeNETWORK expert, discusses their model-driven tool for automating the building of data warehouses. Gertjan also explains how they work with Teradata customers, both existing Teradata customers as well as new customer…
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Dan Graham, General Manager of Enterprise Systems at Teradata, talks with Ron Powell, independent consultant/analyst and BeyeNETWORK expert, about how and why JSON data is used in data warehouses and provides examples. Dan explains this data can be processed and analyzed in ways that were not possib…
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Ron Powell, independent analyst/consultant and BeyeNETWORK expert, talks with Michael Whitehead, Founder and CEO of WhereScape, about the benefits of the data warehouse automation software that WhereScape provides. Judd Watts, Global Alliance Manager for Teradata, shares why WhereScape is a perfect…
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Michael O’Connell, TIBCO’s Chief Data Scientist, and Claudia Imhoff, President of Intelligent Solutions and founder of the Boulder BI Brain Trust, talk about Michael’s role in creating extreme value for their customers through the confluence of analytic knowledge and business acumen to grow revenue,…
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Yves de Montcheuil, Vice President of Marketing at Talend, talks with Ron Powell, independent consultant/analyst and BeyeNETWORK expert, Talend’s partnership with Teradata for Data Warehouse as a Service. Yves also talks about integration for Hadoop implementations….
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James Taylor, CEO of Decision Management Solutions, and Claudia Imhoff, President of Intelligent Solutions and founder of the Boulder BI Brain Trust, talk about how operational analytics has changed because of big data. James provides tips to help organizations effectively tackle their big data anal…
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A remarkable number of vendors are involved in what might be called “specialized business intelligence”. Some don’t want to call it that, because they think that “BI” is old and passé’, and what they do is new and better. Still, if we define BI technology as…
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Lyndsay Wise explains why it is necessary to merge both IT and business-oriented outlooks in order to tie business intelligence to overall strategic business goals….
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Glassbeam checked in recently, and they turn out to exemplify quite a few of the themes I’ve been writing about. For starters: Glassbeam has an analytic technology stack focused on poly-structured machine-generated data. Glassbeam partially organizes that data into event series … ……
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Sharon Odom, Vice President of Strategic Planning and Performance, and Su Rayburn, Director of BI Services, at Delta Community Credit Union talk with Ron Powell, BeyeNETWORK expert and channel leader, about the steps they took to build a second-generation data warehouse in just four months….
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During events such as the current government shutdown, can business intelligence help? Dr. Ramon Barquin suggests it can play an important role….
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I recently wrote (emphasis added): My clients at Teradata Aster probably see things differently, but I don’t think their library of pre-built analytic packages has been a big success. The same goes for other analytic platform vendors who have done similar (generally lesser) things. I believe that th…
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In a general pontification on positioning, I wrote: every product in a category is positioned along the same set of attributes, and went on to suggest that summary attributes were more important than picky detailed ones. So how does that play out for investigative analytics? First, summary attribute…
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I’ve suggested in the past, approximately, that the platform technology side of business intelligence is more significant than the user interface. That formulation, however, doesn’t exactly capture what I believe. To be more precise, let’s differentiate between a couple aspects of…
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There’s a growing trend for DBMS to beef up their support for multiple data manipulation languages (DMLs) or APIs — and there’s a special boom in JSON support, MongoDB-compatible or otherwise. So I talked earlier tonight with IBM’s Bobbie Cochrane about how JSON is managed in…
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Two years ago I wrote about how Zynga managed analytic data: Data is divided into two parts. One part has a pretty ordinary schema; the other is just stored as a huge list of name-value pairs. (This is much like eBay’s approach with its Teradata-based Singularity, except that eBay puts the name-valu…
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There’s no specific mention of the role of business intelligence and analytics in the Federal CIO Council reorganization announcements, and Dr. Ramon Barquin says we’ll have to watch as the reorganization progresses to see the role they will play….
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InetSoft releases Style Intelligence V. 11.5……
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Two subjects in one post, because they were too hard to separate from each other Any sufficiently complex software is developed in modules and subsystems. DBMS are no exception; the core trinity of parser, optimizer/planner, and execution engine merely starts the discussion. But increasingly, databa…
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When we scheduled a call to talk about Sentry, Cloudera’s Charles Zedlewski and I found time to discuss other stuff as well. One interesting part of our discussion was around the processing “frameworks” Cloudera sees as most important. The four biggies are: MapReduce. Duh. SQL, s…
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For years I’ve argued three points about privacy intrusions and surveillance: Privacy intrusions are a huge threat to liberty. Since the Snowden revelations started last June, this view has become more widely accepted. Much of the problem is the very chilling effects they can have upon the ex…
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In this podcast, Ron Powell, BeyeNETWORK expert and channel leader, talks with Chris Brady, CIO of NextGear Capital, about their business intelligence, analytics, reporting and data migration efforts….
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As is the case for most important categories of technology, discussions of BI can get confused. I’ve remarked in the past that there are numerous kinds of BI, and that the very origin of the term “business intelligence” can’t even be pinned down to the nearest century. But th…
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Some subjects just keep coming up. And so I keep saying things like: Most generalizations about “Big Data” are false. “Big Data” is a horrific catch-all term, with many different meanings. Most generalizations about Hadoop are false. Reasons include: Hadoop is a collection o…
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Cubeware’s Steffen Kleinmanns talks with Ron Powell, BeyeNETWORK expert and channel leader, about how Cubeware’s business intelligence applications provide immediate value for their customers….
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Perhaps we should remind ourselves of the many ways data models can be caused to churn. Here are some examples that are top-of-mind for me. They do overlap a lot — and the whole discussion overlaps with my post about schema complexity last January, and more generally with what I’ve writt…
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I lampoon the word “disruptive” for being badly overused. On the other hand, I often refer to the concept myself. Perhaps I should clarify. You probably know that the modern concept of disruption comes from Clayton Christensen, specifically in The Innovator’s Dilemma and its sequ…
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This is probably a good time to disclose that I own a chunk of founders’ stock — no, I didn’t pay cash for it — in LiteStack, the start-up sponsoring ZeroVM. Jordan Novet posted a survey of Hadoop security, and evidently Merv Adrian is making a big deal about the subject as w…
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The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has finally held its first meeting with the full Board, almost 10 years after it was created. In this article, Dr. Barquin states that the Board members should have direct knowledge about privacy preserving tools and techniques, the use of encryption,…
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In this spotlight interview, Ron Powell, BeyeNETWORK expert and channel leader, talks with Michael Hegarty and Joe Beydoun about how they meet their business intelligence needs with Information Builders products….
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My July 2 comments on predictive modeling were far from my best work. Let’s try again. 1. Predictive analytics has two very different aspects. Developing models, aka “modeling”: Is a big part of investigative analytics. May or may not be difficult to parallelize and/or integrate i…
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The extent to which businesses protect their data assets is the extent to which business is limiting its own intelligence….
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Cloudera Cloudera changed CEOs last week. Tom Reilly, late of ArcSight, is the new guy (I don’t know him), while Mike Olson’s titles become Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer. Mike told me Friday that Reilly had secretly been working with him for months. Mike shared good-sounding numbers with me….
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Business intelligence will play an important role as the federal government works to reform grant processes….
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With this article, Lee Feinberg begins a series on the strategic importance of visualization. The series details the steps you need to follow to transform your business intelligence visualizations so they can lead to better and faster decisions….
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A few days ago I posted Daniel Abadi’s thoughts in a discussion of Hadapt, Microsoft PDW (Parallel Data Warehouse)/PolyBase, Pivotal/Greenplum Hawq, and other SQL-Hadoop combinations. This is Dave DeWitt’s response. Emphasis mine. A key point that Daniel seems to be making is that para…
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Birst and Athreya partner……
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My client Syncsort: Is an ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) vendor, whose flagship product DMExpress was evidently renamed to DMX. Has a strong history in and fondness for sort. Has announced a new ETL product, DMX-h ETL Edition, which uses Hadoop MapReduce to parallelize DMX by controlling a copy of DM…
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Lyndsay Wise provides sound advice about increasing the value of your business intelligence investment and ensuring that results meet expectations….
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As I discussed in The Road to Self-Service BI, enterprises need a better understanding of self-service BI so they can avoid the common mistakes often made with it. Self-Service BI Truths The primary goal of self-service BI is to enable business people to perform business analytics in a timely and s…
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For years vendors and pundits have heralded the age of self-service business intelligence (BI) thanks to the arrival of the latest generation of BI tools. First, they talked about how dashboard, OLAP and ad-hoc query were going to enable business people to create their own reports; now they proclaim…
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Advanced analytics provides insight that can’t be gleaned from traditional business intelligence. George Philip, the BeyeNETWORK’s newest expert, discusses why IT organizations need a big data strategy….
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Vendor clients often ask me about pricing. Everybody knows that there usually are: A low-quantity list price. A standard volume discount (typically 50%ish, assuming negligible cost of goods sold). The real negotiated price. But the whole process has to start with some concept of a single-unit pric…
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You are cordially invited to attend the upcoming free TDWI Boston Chapter meeting. All BI and DW professionals are welcome to attend. Please RSVP. When: Thursday, May 9, 2013 12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Where: Deveber Conference Room Children’s Hospital Waltham 9 Hope Avenue…
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New version of Toad BI suite……
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My quick reaction to the Actian/ParAccel deal was negative. A few challenges to my views then emerged. They didn’t really change my mind. Amazon Redshift Amazon did a deal with ParAccel that amounted to: Amazon got a very cheap license to a limited subset of ParAccel’s product … &…
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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 “real-time analytics”, generally with “operational” or “big data” i…
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Cloud-based appliances for business intelligence and data warehousing provide significant benefits. John Bair explores these benefits as well as the challenges and opportunities involved in this type of architecture….
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I talked Friday with Deep Information Sciences, makers of DeepDB. Much like TokuDB — albeit with different technical strategies — DeepDB is a single-server DBMS in the form of a MySQL engine, whose technology is concentrated around writing indexes quickly. That said: DeepDB’s inde…
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In this article, Bin Jiang discusses the constructional efficiencies that can be realized by using a metadata-driven generic operator approach when building a data warehouse….
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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: Workloads and use cases vary greatly. In particular, benchmarks such as the YCSB or TPC-H aren’t…
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Well-resourced Silicon Valley start-ups typically announce their existence multiple times. Company formation, angel funding, Series A funding, Series B funding, company launch, product beta, and product general availability may not be 7 different “news events”, but they’re apt to b…
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If I had my way, the business intelligence part of investigative analytics — i.e. , the class of business intelligence tools exemplified by QlikView and Tableau — would continue to be called “data exploration”. Exploration what’s actually going on, and it also carries c…
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Continuing the discussion on analytical hub design, here’s the second part of my post on the architecture principles. If you missed the first two principles (1. Data from everywhere needs to be accessible and integrated and 2. Building solutions must be fast, iterative and repeatable) see this e…
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I coined a new term, dataset management, for my clients at Revelytix, which they indeed adopted to describe what they do. It would also apply to the recently released Cloudera Navigator. To a first approximation, you may think of dataset management as either or both: Metadata management in a struct…
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William McKnight discusses the tools that are essential for a successful analytic architecture….
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Self-service business intelligence (BI) is easily one of the hottest and most important topics in the business and IT community as yet another challenge in the age of Big Data and how to use it. What’s at stake is not the value of ……
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In his article in Big Data, Bob Eve offers this quote from Professors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT: “Companies that inject Big Data and analytics into their operations show productivity rates and profitability that are 5% to 6% higher than those of their peers.” Data is t…
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BISTRO, a new Hadoop-based apps market, offers business intelligence software and tools that save organizations time and trouble, says Cubeware….
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WibiData is essentially on the trajectory: Started with platform-ish technology. Selling analytic application subsystems, focused for now on personalization. Hopeful of selling complete analytic applications in the future. The same, it turns out, is true of Causata.* Talking with them both the sam…
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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 easy, or easier, to an analyze; so many, in fact, that cataloguing them all is for…
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Is your organization making the most of your Business Intelligence (BI) technologies? While BI enables individuals to easily access and gather information, the value is limited unless information is used as a call for action….
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To my taste, the most glaring mis-rankings in the 2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management are that it is too positive on Kognitio and too negative on Infobright. Secondarily, it is too negative on HP Vertica, and too positive on ParAccel and Actian/VectorWise. So let’…
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Seminar agenda Learn about apps for work -Documents and Files -Presentations -Meetings and Collaboration -Business Intelligence See examples of how iPad is mobilizing businesses……
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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 databases are usually still a good default assumption … … but increasingly…
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The eternal gap between IT departments and business units bedevils many organizations. But there’s a way to get them on the same page, and business intelligence has a role to play. (This article was included in a recent issue of our BI Trends + Strategies e-zine.)……
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In this BeyeNETWORK Spotlight interview, Ron Powell talks with Barry Thompson, Founder and CTO of Tervela. Barry explains their approach for real-time business intelligence and big data analytics….
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Lee Feinberg explains that succeeding with the next generation of business intelligence and visualization software involves a lot more than the software. It requires a new way of thinking and effective communication with team members….
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Bin Jiang discusses a new constructional paradigm for data warehousing. He proposes that the construction would be substantially more effective if the domain-generic knowledge is kept centralized….
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Data/database virtualization seems to be a hot subject right now, and vendors of a broad variety of different technologies are all claiming to be in the space. A terminological mess has ensued, as Monash’s First and Third Laws of Commercial Semantics are borne out in spades. If something is li…
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Ron Powell of the BeyeNETWORK interviews Ash Parikh, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Informatica, about the evolution of business intelligence and how Informatica is addressing the new requirements of their customers….
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Big data analytics applications require high-performance data availability. Unfortunately, there’s one key part of many IT infrastructures that isn’t prepared to meet that challenge. (This article was included in a recent issue of our BI Trends + Strategies e-zine.)……
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Merv Adrian and Doug Henschen both reported more details about Amazon Redshift than I intend to; see also the comments on Doug’s article. I did talk with Rick Glick of ParAccel a bit about the project, and he noted: Amazon Redshift is missing parts of ParAccel, notably the extensibility frame…
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A consensus has evolved that: Columnar compression (i.e., value-based compression) compresses better than block-level compression (i.e., compression of bit strings). Columnar compression can be done pretty well in row stores. Still somewhat controversial is the claim that: Columnar compression ca…
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Yellowfin releases Storyboard……
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I recently opined that, especially for cutting-edge internet businesses, analytic applications were not a realistic option; rather, analytic application subsystems are the most you can currently expect. Erin Griffith further observed that the problem isn’t just confined to analytics:  “We did…
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The November edition of BI Trends + Strategies,” data visualization, data stewardship and the big data bottleneck….
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Imagine a website whose purpose is to encourage consumers to take actions — for example to click on an ad, click on the next page, or actually make a purchase. Best practices for such a site include: An ever-evolving user experience, informed by — among other factors — creativity,…
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William McKnight, independent consultant and BeyeNETWORK expert, talks with Chris Stewart, Director of MedAssets, to learn about their Teradata data warehousing project….
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Analyze, analyze, analyze. That’s the mandate in many companies. But to avoid negative repercussions, it’s wise to proceed with caution and consider the moral issues created by powerful analytics tools. (This article was included in a recent issue of our BI Trends + Strategies e-zine.)……
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I recently proposed a 2×2 matrix of BI use cases: Is there an operational business process involved? Is there a focus on root cause analysis? Let me now introduce another 2×2 matrix of analytic scenarios: Is there a compelling need for super-fresh data? Who’s consuming the results…
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This month’s edition of BI Trends + Strategies provides expert advice on how to succeed with data visualization. The second article tells you how to avoid common data stewardship pitfalls, and popular BeyeNETWORK expert David Loshin looks at big data anlaytics from an infrastructure perspective in…
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LogiXML CMO Ken Chow talks with BeyeNETWORK’s Ron Powell about business intelligence from the IT perspective….
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In my world it’s possible to have a hasty 2-hour conversation, and that’s exactly what I had with Cloudera last week. We touched on hardware and general adoption, but much of the conversation was about Cloudera Impala, announced today. Like Hive, Impala turns Hadoop into a basic analytic…
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In this information-driven age, analyzing data is more important than ever, but ensuring that it can be trusted should come first.(This article was included in a recent issue of our BI Trends + Strategies e-zine.)……
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These databases, mammoth by definition, are evolving to accommodate the influx of new big data types, technical innovations and increasing volumes brought on by the rise of “big data.” (This article was included in a recent issue of our BI Trends + Strategies e-zine.)……
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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 (most of whom partner with a 6th client, Tableau); the first 2 whose offerings I’ve actuall…
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I took the opportunity of Teradata’s Aster/Hadoop appliance announcement to catch up with Teradata hardware chief Carson Schmidt. I love talking with Carson, about both general design philosophy and his views on specific hardware component technologies. From a hardware-requirements standpoint,…
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Two of the more interesting approaches for integrating Hadoop and MapReduce with relational DBMS come from my clients at Teradata Aster (via SQL/MR and SQL-H)  and Hadapt. In both cases, the story starts: You can dump any kind of data you want into Hadoop’s file system. You can have data in…
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Learn more about Lyndsay Wise’s new book – Using Open Source Platforms for Business Intelligence ….
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When projects fail to deliver the expected results, the culprit is often inadequate preparation. Eric King explains that for successful predictive analytics, program managers and data analysts need to first understand what it is they are getting into. (This article was included in a recent issue of…
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These are three closely-related draft entries for the DBMS2 analytic glossary. Please comment with any ideas you have for their improvement! 1. Database management system (DBMS) In our definition, a database management system (DBMS) is: Software that manages the reading and writing of data ……
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By my standards, I’ve been writing a lot about Oracle and IBM recently. Let me now step back and review the context in which I view them. At the highest level, Oracle and IBM have similar strategic priorities, in line with the Innovator’s Dilemma/Innovator’s Solution issues I keep…
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As best I can tell, IBM now has three related families of hardware/software bundles, aka appliances, aka PureSystems, aka something that sounds like “expert system” but in fact has nothing to do with the traditional rules-engine meaning of that term. In particular, One of the three fami…
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Bearing in mind the difficulties in covering big companies and their products, I had a call with IBM about its core ETL technology (Extract/Transform/Load), and have some notes accordingly. It’s pretty reasonable to say that there are and were a Big Three of high-end ETL vendors: Informatica…
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Please disregard any intentions I expressed of traveling in October, in particular a trip to visit 20 or so California clients. I’m under doctor’s orders not to fly for several weeks, and also don’t feel like driving (or walking) any significant distances. Any meetings I have in th…
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Successful BI for small and midsize businesses isn’t just about implementing software. They have work to do before deployments to make sure systems will be readily adopted and produce valid results. (This article was included in a recent issue of our BI Trends + Strategies e-zine.)……
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Read this month’s edition of BI Trends + Strategies . The articles from Eric King, Kelle O’Neal, and Roger du Mars and packed with advice for your analytics, BI and data governance efforts….
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This eBook will explain the fundamental differences between the IBM Netezza 1000 and Oracle Exadata solutions. You will learn which solutions best meet your business needs and how to achieve optimal results from your data….
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It’s time to change the way your company thinks about disseminating BI data to a broader set of business users, particularly in visual formats. But be prepared for resistance. (This article was included in a recent issue of our BI Trends + Strategies e-zine.)……
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In this article, Bin Jiang analyzes the typical programming process used for ETL mechanism construction….
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This article by Claudia Imhoff and Colin White explores the characteristics of data scientists and looks at why they are in such high demand. (This article was included in a recent issue of our BI Trends + Strategies e-zine.)……
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Tuesday, Sept. 11 @ 4 ET A Novel Approach to the Analytic Sandbox Challenge The Briefing Room with Rick Sherman and Composite Software REGISTER NOW! The analytics development process involves a wide range of requirements, any one of which can prove challenging. First you identify the best sources…
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In this BeyeNETWORK spotlight, Ron Powell interviews Dale Skeen, CTO of Vitria. Dale explains Operational Intelligence and how it differs from operational business intelligence. Dale explains the benefits of Operational Intelligence for analyzing social media data, one of the largest sources of big…
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I’m hearing more and more stories about uninterrupted DBMS operation. There are no iron-clad assurances of zero downtime; if nothing else, you could crash your whole system yourself via some kind of application bug. Even so, it’s a worthy ideal, and near-zero downtime is a practical goal…
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Business intelligence beyond the firewall……
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This post started as a minor paragraph in another one I’m drafting. But it grew. Increasingly many data management systems store data in a cluster, putting several copies of data — i.e. “replicas” — onto different nodes, for safety and reliable accessibility. (The numbe…
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Bin Jiang explores how Archimedes and Henry Ford may have employed the ETL mechanism in data warehousing….
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This is the fourth post in my series on changing our approach to BI development. In order to break the BI backlog, move towards more pervasive BI and increase the BI business ROI, an enterprise needs to make fundamental changes to their BI efforts. These changes are interrelated and necessary for su…
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This is the third post in my series on changing our approach to BI development. In order to break the BI backlog, move towards more pervasive BI and increase the BI business ROI, an enterprise needs to make fundamental changes to their BI efforts. These changes are interrelated and necessary for suc…
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This is a draft entry for the DBMS2 analytic glossary. Please comment with any ideas you have for its improvement! Note: Words and phrases in italics will be linked to other entries when the glossary is complete. “In-database analytics” is a catch-all term for analytic capabilities, beyo…
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This is a draft entry for the DBMS2 analytic glossary. Please comment with any ideas you have for its improvement! Note: Words and phrases in italics will be linked to other entries when the glossary is complete. A data warehouse appliance is a combination of hardware and software that includes an a…
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Tightening integration with Oracle E-Business Suite……
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What constitutes data quality when analyzing millions of daily transactions? Does trustworthy data mean “perfect” data? You might be surprised at the answers. (This article was included in a recent issue of our BI Trends + Strategies e-zine.)……
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Ron Powell talks with Laura Madsen, Healthcare Practice Leader at Lancet and BeyeNETWORK Healthcare Expert, about how the adoption of business intelligence by healthcare organizations has accelerated due the need to be in compliance with regulatory requirements….
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Laura Madsen delves into the topic of big data, describes when big data is valuable and provides steps to prepare your organization for big data when the time is right….
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The 3 V’s of big data – volume, variety and velocity – place new demands on information architectures. What worked in the past may not be the best choice for the advanced analytics that are poised to provide substantial business value. (This article was included in a recent issue of our BI Trends +…
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In today’s post about HCatalog, I noted that the Hadoop/HCatalog community didn’t necessarily understand all the kinds of metadata that enterprises need and want, especially in the context of data integration and ETL and ELT (Extract/Transform/Load/Transform). That raises a natural quest…
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BI implementations are stuck in a rut. This rut has short-circuited many small to medium size businesses’ (SMB) new BI initiatives.  And, it has thwarted existing BI applications at large enterprises that are trying to be responsive to new and changing business analytic requirements. Business…
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My recent post on broadening the usefulness of statistics presupposed two things about the statistical sophistication of business intelligence tool users: It varies a lot. In many cases, it isn’t be very high. Let me now say a little more on the subject. My basic message is — people…
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Bill Inmon explains how enterprise-wide metadata has been holding back the next-generation of data warehousing, and he indicates that the vision of DW 2.0 may become a reality soon….
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The July issue of BI Trends + Strategies contains a wealth of advice on collaborative business intelligence, location intelligence and data governance….
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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. Online schema evolution. Workload management. Also: I have some tidbits to add to my June, 2011 cove…
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Chris Kanaracus uncovered a case of Oracle actually pulling an ad after having been found “guilty” of false advertising. The essence seems to be that Oracle claimed 20X hardware performance vs. IBM, based on a comparison done against 6 year old hardware running an earlier version of the…
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Implementing a global business intelligence solution can be a daunting task, but this article describes seven critical success factors to help ensure a successful project….
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Michael Corcoran, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Information Builders, talks with Ron Powell about how Information Builders focuses on providing their customers with access to information and increased ability to work with information, thus enabling better business intelligence…
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Business intelligence managers once talked longingly about weaning end users off their Excel addictions to help ensure that BI data remained consistent and secure. Yeah, right: In most cases, efforts to eradicate Excel from BI processes went nowhere, forcing BI teams to shift to a strategy of accomm…
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Larger businesses have always had the advantage of having more resources to throw at problems. Organizations – large and small – are gathering and storing enormous amounts of information. But typically, only the big companies have ……
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Marty Carney proposes a new model for training business intelligence users. The new model, according to Carney, will result in more effective and efficient users and also increase end-user adoption….
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Having  recently categorized seven different kinds of database, let me now make a similar effort for business intelligence. To a first approximation, I’d like to split BI use cases into 2×2 = 4 groups, along two dimensions: Is there an operational business process involved? Is there a f…
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In theory: A database query is a predicate. A DBMS matches the data it manages against the predicate and send back those records for which the predicate is true. And so it would seem that query results always have to be exact. Even so, there are at least four different practical scenarios in which…
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Ben Jiang elaborates on five categories of system requirements for the enterprise data warehouse….
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Ron Powell interviews Dave Wilt, Director of Products at Apptio, to learn how business intelligence and analytics in the Apptio products make it possible for companies to understand their IT spend so they can make more cost-effective decisions….
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I’ve been talking some with the Neo Technology/Neo4j guys, including Emil Eifrem (CEO/cofounder), Johan Svensson (CTO/cofounder), and Philip Rathle (Senior Director of Products). Basics include: Neo Technology came up with Neo4j, open sourced it, and is building a company around the open sour…
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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” [1] Over the years there have been many technology waves related to the design, development and deployment of Business Intelligence (BI).  As BI technologies evolved, they have been able to significantly expand their function…
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When I grumbled about the conference-related rush of Hadoop announcements, one example of many was Teradata Aster’s SQL-H. Still, it’s an interesting idea, and a good hook for my first shot at writing about HCatalog. Indeed, other than the Talend integration bundled into Hortonworks̵…
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Ben Jiang discusses how having a well-designed classification system to define data warehousing terms is beneficial and shares the four classifications he thinks are most accurate….
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SOA adoption is complex and successful strategies based on a maturity model and lessons learned provide an excellent pathway for your roadmap. This is why Oracle has developed a pragmatic, holistic approach, based on years of ……
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This is part of a four-post series, covering: Annoying Hadoop marketing themes that should be ignored. Hadoop versions and distributions, and their readiness or lack thereof for production. In general, how “enterprise-ready” is Hadoop (this post)? HBase 0.92. The posts depend on each o…
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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 fall. Basic replication is under development too. Subset of SQL-92. MySQL wire-compatible (…
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This is part of a three-post series: Introduction to Metamarkets and Druid Druid overview Metamarkets’ back-end technology (this post) The canonical Metamarkets batch ingest pipeline is a bit complicated. Data lands on Amazon S3 (uploaded or because it was there all along). Metamarkets pro…
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In August 2010, I wrote about Workday’s interesting technical architecture, highlights of which included: Lots of small Java objects in memory. A very simple MySQL backing store (append-only, <10 tables). Some modernistic approaches to application navigation. A faceted approach to BI. I c…
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Prior to the hybrid cloud, IT determined how an enterprise infrastructure grew. With the introduction of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), lines of business, such as marketing, sales and logistics, can expand the enterprise ……
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For businesses seeking to increase flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency, a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) could be the solution. It has the power to make your organization more agile and speed up your application ……
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QlikTech has bought Expressor. Notes on that include: Expressor wanted to offer data integration/ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) that was all things to all people — great parallel performance, great UI, great price, etc. In practice, Expressor seemed to focus on cheap/easy ETL in the Microsoft W…
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Bin Jiang closely examines the definition of data warehouse and determines three functionalities should always be included….
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Cloudant is one of the few NoSQL companies with >100 paying subscription customers. For starters: Cloudant’s core software is a fork of CouchDB. Cloudant only sells you software as a service. More precisely, whether Cloudant offers DBaaS (DataBase as a Service) or PaaS (Platform as a Servi…
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This paper, by Colin White, BI research, looks at new developments in business analytics and discusses the benefits analyzing big data bring to the business. It also examines different types of big data workloads and offers ……
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You are cordially invited to attend the upcoming TDWI Boston Chapter meeting. All BI and DW professionals are welcome to attend. Please RSVP.When: May 31, 12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Where: Room 105 Shillman Hall 115 Forsyth St Boston, MA 02115 Topics: “From FICO Score to Risk Score – A Journey Into…
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I had dinner tonight with the Kognitio folks. So far as I can tell: Branding has been mercifully simplified. Everything is now called “Kognitio” (as opposed to, for example, “WX2″). Notwithstanding its long history of selling disk-based DBMS and denigrating memory-only confi…
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Teradata is paying me to join a panel on “data science” in downtown Boston, Tuesday May 22, at 3:00 pm. A planning phone call led me to jot down a few notes on the subject, which I’m herewith adapting into a blog post. For starters, I have some concerns about the concepts of data s…
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This post is part of a series on managing and analyzing graph data. Posts to date include: Graph data model basics Relationship analytics definition Relationship analytics applications Analysis of large graphs (this post) My series on graph data management and analytics got knocked off-stride by…
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Learn more about Laura Madsen’s new book – Healthcare Business Intelligence: A Guide to Empowering Successful Data Reporting and Analytics ….
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Articles and case studies written about “big data” analytics programs proclaim the successes of organizations, typically with a focus on the technologies used to build the systems. Product information is useful, of course, but it’s also critical for enterprises embarking on these projects to be sure…
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Business Intelligence (BI) has been a hot topic for years. The acceleration of data volumes, desire by business users to tap this data for insight, and the overall pressure on organizations to do more with less is putting a ……
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Krish Krishnan breaks down the types of workloads in a standard data warehouse and then explains how isolating workloads helps you leverage the infrastructure….
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A reporter wrote in to ask whether investor interest in “Big Data” was justified or hype. (More precisely, that’s how I reinterpreted his questions. ) His examples were Splunk’s IPO, Teradata’s stock price increase, and Birst’s financing. In a nutshell: My comm…
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In part 3 of his series on wisdom and business strategy, Frank Buytendijk describes how context and perspective are very important in applying wisdom to data….
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David Loshin discusses data models for analytics and explains why a maintained table of facts – a dimensional model – is effective in a data warehouse….
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Much of the technology I consult about boils down to performance. There are many sub-categories — parallelization, scalability, low latency, interactive response, price/performance, and more. But basically it’s about computers operating faster, within realistic resource constraints. Ther…
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I visited my clients at Cloudera and Hortonworks last week, along with scads of other companies. A few of the takeaways were: Cloudera now has 220 employees. Cloudera now has over 100 subscription customers. Over the past year, Cloudera has more than doubled in size by every reasonable metric. Over…
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In this edition of our monthly e-zine, you’ll find a performance management article from BeyeNETWORK expert Craig Schiff along with articles on coping with big data silos and the increasing adoption of mobile BI software….
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Ron Powell talks with Tapan Patel, Global Product Marketing Manager – Predictive Analytics and Data Mining at SAS, about how big data is impacting the world of predictive analytics….
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Chuck Berger, CEO of ParAccel, describes to Ron Powell how their massively parallel database, a software-only solution, improves an organization’s big data analytic efforts….
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Releases ActiveSpaces 2.0……
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I’m frequently asked to generalize in some way about in-memory or memory-centric data management. I can start: The desire for human real-time interactive response naturally leads to keeping data in RAM. Many databases will be ever cheaper to put into RAM over time, thanks to Moore’s Law…
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I first became an analyst in 1981. And so I was around for the early days of the movement from batch to interactive computing, as exemplified by: The rise of minicomputers as mainframe alternatives (first VAXen, then the ‘nix systems that did largely supplant mainframes). The move from batch…
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Read this research report from Wayne Eckerson to learn the about the role of collaboration in a BI environment….
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David Loshin explains that business analytics requires careful attention to well-defined processes for soliciting, capturing, and managing semantic and business metadata. Without these processes in place, the analytics results delivered to the organization may be confusing or inaccurate….
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ClearStory Data launched, with nice coverage in the New York Times, Computerworld, and elsewhere. But from my standpoint, there were some serious problems: (Bad.) I was planning to cover the launch as well, in a split exclusive, but that plan was changed, costing me considerable wasted work. (Worse…
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In this Spotlight interview, Ron Powell and John Crupi, CTO of JackBe, discuss how connecting into data as it’s happening provides real-time operational intelligence, and John provides insight into JackBe’s unique, browser-based, self-service dashboards….
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For this spotlight interview, Glen Rabie, CEO of Yellowfin, is interviewed by Ron Powell of the BeyeNETWORK. They discuss how and why Yellowfin enables organizations to make business intelligence available to more than a select few power users….
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“Data integration” can mean many different things, to an extent that’s impeding me from writing about the area. So I’ll start by simply laying out some of the myriad ways that data can be brought to where it is needed, and worry about other subjects later. Yes, this is a mass…
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Manually-coded extracts are another dirty secret of the BI world. I’ve been seeing them for years, in both large and small companies. They grow haphazardly and are never documented, which practically guarantees that they will become an IT nightmare. How have manually-coded extracts become so prevale…
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In this Spotlight, Ron Powell and Matt Benati, Vice President of Global Marketing at Attunity, discuss the evolution and benefits of high performance data replication….
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There’s a growing consensus that consumers require limits on the predictive modeling that is done about them. That’s a theme of the Obama Administration’s recent work on consumer data privacy; it’s central to other countries’ data retention regulations; and it’s s…
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This is one of a series of posts on business intelligence and related analytic technology subjects, keying off the 2011/2012 version of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms. The four posts in the series cover: Overview comments about the 2011/2012 Gartner Magic Quadr…
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This is one of a series of posts on business intelligence and related analytic technology subjects, keying off the 2011/2012 version of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms. The four posts in the series cover: Overview comments about the 2011/2012 Gartner Magic Qu…
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I recently wrote a long post on the premise that enterprise analytic applications are not like the other (operational) kind. That begs the question(s): What are operational enterprise applications like? Historically, the essence of enterprise applications has been data management — they captur…
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I recently wrote a long post on the premise that enterprise analytic applications are not like the other (operational) kind. That begs the question(s): What are operational enterprise applications like? Historically, the essence of enterprise applications has been data management — they captur…
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In this Spotlight interview, Ron Powell talks with Clint Johnson, Vice President of Customers Solutions for Alpine Data Labs, about how organizations can extract value from big data with scalable predictive analytics and data mining….
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In this Spotlight, Ron Powell interviews Rony Ross, CEO of Panorama Software. Rony explains the benefits of social business intelligence that is complemented by collaboration and contextual search….
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Exadata is Oracle’s fastest growing new product. Much of the growth of Exadata has come at the expense of specialized data warehouse appliance vendors. These vendors have published competitive comparisons to Exadata, claiming: ……
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Oracle BI is a highly scalable, manageable, configurable, extendable and easy to use platform that is well suited for both cloud and non-cloud deployments. Oracle BI’s web services based SOA architecture, metadata based design, ……
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My clients at Odiago, vendors of WibiData, have changed their company name simply to WibiData. Even better, they blogged with more detail as to how WibiData works, in what is essentially a follow-on to my original WibiData post last October. Among other virtues, WibiData turns out to be a poster chi…
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In this Spotlight, Ron Powell talks with Alan Meyer, Marketing Manager of Data Warehousing on System z, IBM Software Group, about the DB2 Analytics Accelerator, data federation, and why people are returning to the mainframe for operational business analytics….
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Forrester has released its Q1 2012 Forrester Wave: Enterprise Hadoop Solutions. (Googling turns up a direct link, but in case that doesn’t prove stable, here also is a registration-required link from IBM’s Conor O’Mahony.) My comments include: The Forrester Wave’s relative v…
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Do you need your Cognos BI Server to access data located in Microsoft SQL Server? Is your Cognos BI Server on UNIX or Linux? If the answer is yes, check out this step-by-step tutorial to see just how easy it is to solve this ……
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It seems that my IT vendor strategy worksheet was well-received, by companies at different stages of development, clients and non-clients alike.* So here’s the promised sequel — a similar worksheet with more of an execution orientation. If your answers to these questions don’t dove…
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Do you need your Cognos BI Server to access data located in Salesforce.com? If the answer is yes, check out this step-by-step tutorial to see just how easy it is to solve this problem. Integrating Salesforce.com with IBM Cognos ……
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Where are all the big-data people? A recent front-page article in the Boston Globe raised this very issue. The article, “Mass. firms see riches, jobs in charting oceans of data”, discussed reports on Big Data by the Mass Technology Leadership Council (MTLC) and McKinsey Global Institute regarding th…
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To help improve your business decisions and create value, Donn DiNunno outlines ten lessons learned from implementing business intelligence and performance management programs….
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Microsoft is launching SQL Server 2012 on March 7. An IM chat with a reporter resulted, and went something like this. Reporter: [Care to comment]? CAM: SQL Server is an adequate product if you don’t mind being locked into the Microsoft stack. For example, the ColumnStore feature is very partia…
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Ron Powell and Jake Freivald, Vice President of Marketing at Information Builders, discuss the current state of business intelligence as reported in a recent study that was conducted by Vanson Bourne for Information Builders….
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Microsoft Excel spreadsheets are the top BI tool of choice. That choking sound you hear is vendors and IT people reacting viscerally when they confront this fact. Their responses include: Business people are averse to change; they don’t want to invest time in learning a new tool Business people don…
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This post is part of a short series on the history of analytics, covering: Historical notes on analytics — the pre-computer era (this post) Historical notes on analytic terminology Historical notes on analytics — departmental adoption Sometimes, what people describe as being “N…
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This post is part of a short series on the history of analytics, covering: Historical notes on analytics — the pre-computer era Historical notes on analytic terminology (this post) Historical notes on analytics — departmental adoption Discussions of the history of analytic technology…
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This post is part of a short series on the history of analytics, covering: Historical notes on analytics — the pre-computer era (this post) Historical notes on analytic terminology Historical notes on analytics — departmental adoption Sometimes, what people describe as being “N…
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The overwhelming amount of articles, seminars, white papers and product announcements on big data, predictive analytics, cloud and mobile business intelligence might make you think that every business person is walking around with real-time dashboards on their tablets,  figuring out how to get…
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In this spotlight interview, Ron Powell talks with Ken Chow about the hurdles companies face as they attempt to make business intelligence available to more users within their organizations….
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Splunk is announcing the Splunk 4.3 point release. Before discussing it, let’s recall a few things about Splunk, starting with: Splunk is first and foremost an analytic DBMS … … used to manage logs and similar multistructured data. Splunk’s DML (Data Manipulation Language) i…
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Recently, I observed that Big Data terminology is seriously broken. It is reasonable to reduce the subject to two quasi-dimensions: Bigness — Volume, Velocity, size Structure — Variety, Variability, Complexity given that High-velocity “big data” problems are usually high-v…
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Enterprises are awash with data from customers, suppliers, employees and their operational systems. Most enterprises have data warehousing (DW) or business intelligence (BI) programs, which sometimes have been operating for many years. The DW/BI programs frequently do not provide the consistent info…
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To help you build the business case for a new data mining project, Casey Klimasauskas offers a framework for quantifying the project’s risks and benefits, and building broad-based support for the project at the same time….
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Learn how best in class organizations, using a total cost of ownership approach to BI, achieve superior results….
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Bill Inmon describes how advances in technology and new data types have shaped the evolution of the data warehouse….
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I’m hearing a lot these days about agile predictive analytics, albeit rarely in those exact terms. The general idea is unassailable, in that it boils down to using data as quickly as reasonably possible. But discussing particulars is hard, for several reasons: Pundits tend to sketch castles i…
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I’ve already suggested that several apparent issues in predictive analytic agility can be dismissed by straightforwardly applying best-of-breed technology, for example in analytic data management. At first blush, the same could be said about the actual analysis, which comprises: Data preparat…
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Ron Powell interviews Jignesh Shah, Vice President of SOA Product Management and Marketing for Software AG, about what is driving the growing adoption of master data management, how MDM relates to data quality and data governance, and the benefits of managing the dimensions of the master data needed…
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