Blog: Richard Hackathorn

« July 2008 | Main | September 2008 »

August 30, 2008

Dataupia Frees Your Data

At the Boulder BI Brain Trust, we heard a presentation from Dataupia about their company background, product offering, and future directions. They offer a versatile data warehouse appliance.

See the complete blog item here.

Share:

August 28, 2008

Take a Survey on Data Warehouse Appliances

Supported by Teradata, Netezza and Kognitio, an independent research study is looking at the trends in the Data Warehouse Appliance (DWA) market. Much is happening, much of which is counter-intuitive.

If you are an IT professional with opinions on DWA, please take 5 minutes to take a survey. I will analyze the results objectively and report those results to you. The complete report will be posted for free on the B-eye-NETWORK. Thank you, Richard

Click Here

Share:

August 27, 2008

Business Intelligence as Decision Intelligence

An article by Colin White reflects on the evolution of our BI profession from Decision Support Systems (DSS) to Data Warehousing (DW). He suggests that it is time for a new term - Decision Intelligence - that recognizes the extension of BI beyond DW. He further suggests that Decision Intelligence integrates three areas:

- Business Process Intelligence (event analytics - operational or real-time BI sans DW)
- Business Data Intelligence (strategic/tactics analytics- traditional BI)
- Business Content Intelligence (content analytics - text and other unstructured data)

Although I can argue about the details, I highly recommend Colin's article as a step in the right direction toward redefining BI. Maybe it really is DSS 2.0, as he muses.

Share:

August 25, 2008

Petabyte Data Warehouses?

Over the last year, vendors have been mentioning (alluding to, to be more precise) customers who are building (and maybe even operating) data warehouses containing more than a petabyte of data. An analyst that I follow, Cust Monash, had a recent article that remarked that the "petabyte barrier is crumbing" and that "the 100-terabyte mark is almost old hat".

I sensed the same. However, I have a concern with this trend toward bigger...and hence better.

Do we really need all that data? Can we really manage all that data? Does all that data really result in meaningful business value? Can we, as finite human beings, really comprehend all that data?

I am not concerned about the technical side of the equation. Over time, the storage devices, I/O data channels, MPP grids, parallel query optimizers, and so forth will evolve to handle petabytes and more.

I am concerned about the soft side of he equation. It is a 'simple' matter of information complexity!

As an illustration, if we add more and more rows to a customer table, do we add more value that the business could potentially realize? Likewise, if we add more and more columns to a customer table, do we add more value that the business could potentially realize? If we add more and more tables to the data warehouse, do we add more value that the business could potentially realize? By the phrase 'more and more' I am implying several orders of magitude more!

As IT professionals, we need to take a step (or many steps) backward and look the entire end-to-end process. More information is only better information when the organization can assimulate the information and change its behavior to improve business performance. If the organization can not assimulate the information, then more information is not better. If the organization does not change its behavior, then more information is irrelevant. If the organization does not improve its improveness, then more information has no value or even a negative value.

Therefore, I conclude that petabyte data warehouses will be a liability for most organizations. It will be like giving a hot sport car to a teenage driver. They can not handle the extreme capability. At best, it will be a huge waste of resources. At worst, it may result in the demise of those involved. There will be exceptions. I would like to talk with those who survive their petabyte experience.

Share:

August 22, 2008

TUSC Creates Instant SOA

At the Boulder BI Brain Trust, we heard a presentation from TUSC about their company background, product offering, and future directions. They are offering a tool to create an instant SOA .

See the complete blog item here.

Share:

Calling all Historical Computer Mugs

One of the traditions of the Boulder BI Brain Trust is to serve coffee in mugs labeled by companies who are no longer. If you have a mug sitting around gathering dust and if the mug logo has historic IT value, please send it to Claudia Imhoff at Intelligent Solutions, PO Box 4587, Boulder, CO 80306.

We will forever be indebted to you!
...as we sip our coffee and contemplate the future of yet another IT company.

Share:

i-lluminate shines on...

At the Boulder BI Brain Trust, we heard a presentation from i-lluminate Solutions about their company background, product offering, and future directions. They have an exploratory data analysis tool using a value-based database structure.

See the complete blog item here.

Share:

August 14, 2008

IBM Expands InfoSphere Branding

IBM is announcing enhancements of the products within the InfoSphere family, along with sharpening the branding of InfoSphere, which will definitely alleviate customer confusion about their product offerings.

Enhancements falls into four categories:

- Global support: new languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese) and multi-cultural names/addresses

- Administration tools: deployment, QualityStage, business glossary, FastTrack for managing corporate naming standards

- SOA/Grid: added JMS, REST, RSS bindings, Oracle as data provider, managing the deployment and execution across grids

- Mainframe Data: access to non-relational data sources, PL/1 metadata, JDBC connectivity, native VSAM-VSAM replication

Share:

August 5, 2008

Microsoft Research Confirms a 'Small World' for IM Chats

In an outstanding research article, Jure Leskovec of Carnegie-Mellon and Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research analyzed 30 billion IM conversations among 240 million people during the month of June 2006. This resulted in a network graph with 180 million nodes (a person who sent a message during that month) and 1.3 billion undirected edges (two persons exchanged messages) - by far the largest data set for social networking. In fact, the authors described their investigation as being 'planetary-scale'!

A key result was the confirmation of Stanley Milgram's popularized hypothesis that any two persons in the world are, on the average, separated by six degrees. That is, only four other persons are needed to form a path between those two persons. Leskovec and Horvitz found that the average degree of separation was 6.6 with a median of 6. The longest paths had lengths of under 30, which is still amazing. In contrast, if one person wanted to find another person among a group of 180 million, you would expect to search through half of that group. Right? Correct if you were searching randomly for that person.

This is called the Small World phenomenon where the interconnections of a social network are much more strong than one would expect based on random networks. In other words, we as social beings have a strong affinity for selectively connecting to others, even using Microsoft Messager.

The above result about six degrees was only one of dozens. The results of the research article go on and on! The reader is forewarned that the article is slow reading, but only 10 pages.

I wrote an article entitled The Link is the Thing in August of 2003, in which I applied the Small World phenomenon to enterprise data warehouses. We may have small worlds lurking in our EDW! I encourage you to apply network analysis techniques to EDW as I suggested. I obviously would be very interested in what you find.

Share:

Sybase Enters Data Warehouse Appliance Market

At TechWave, Sybase reannounced today the Sybase Analytic Appliance, which is their packaging of Sybase IQ with the IBM Power platform, along with a 10-user license for MicroStrategy tools. The appliance is sold and supported by systems integrator mLogica.

Sybase is offerings various configuration ranging from 3 TB with 40 users to 48 TB with 160 users. The average cost per terabyte is around $27,000, although specific pricing on these configurations was not given.

With the Microsoft acquisition of DATAllegro, the DWA market has become a interesting place to watch! I wonder whether Sybase's new offering will have the MPP-power to compete.

Share: