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Blog: Krish Krishnan

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Number Crunching

A concept like none other, number crunching has always been thought of in scientific applications, real time applications and complex processing of large numeric calculations. With the rebirth of Data Mining and Predictive Analytics and the increasing adoption to Data Warehousing and Operational Data, number crunching will soon be common to the data practitioners, if not already.

How will number crunching matter to business intelligence and data warehouse professionals? think of it in terms of data itself, instead of 3 years of data, if you have access to 10 years or 30, years of data, the impact will be quite a splash. From a solution perspective, there are multiple layers of impact from the front end tools and infrastructure to the back end tools and infrastructure.

The cost of infrastructure will be a non issue with the advent of data warehouse appliances from a back end perspective. But the cost of front end tools and processing of the result sets will be expensive, this is due to the cost of the algorithms and the analysis required from the results. Over a period of time, with more standard statistical models, this cost can be commoditized.

What is the advantage of providing a number crunching platform for data warehousing? the advantages are manifold. More data will mean better insights to the subject area under analysis
Larger data sets will provide a robust platform for analytical applications like SAS and KXEN.

Another topic that is creating a lot of excitement is integrating unstructured and structured data in the data warehouse. This subject is even more exciting when you think of a medical software like ISABEL used across hospitals getting an integration with staff notes from years of patient data. Such an integration will be loved by both doctors and insurers alike.

As we move in to the new era of data warehousing, let us also embrace the concept of number crunching into this side of the world.

  Posted by kkrishnan on June 29, 2008 7:02 PM |

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