• What colleges should teach in analytics

    Updated: 2011-06-27 16:57:13
    Based on a Teradata press release calling attention to the small amount of explicit university instruction in business intelligence, I was asked: Does BI really need a dedicated undergrad track? What sort of BI and analytics-related skills should students look to obtain now in order to be viable in the job marketplace five years out? [...]

  • What to think about BEFORE you make a technology decision

    Updated: 2011-06-26 19:51:06
    When you are considering technology selection or strategy, there are a lot of factors that can each have bearing on the final decision — a whole lot. Below is a very partial list. In almost any IT decision, there are a number of environmental constraints that need to be acknowledged. Organizations may have standard vendors, [...]

  • Observations on Oracle pricing

    Updated: 2011-06-24 07:45:45
    A couple of months ago, Oracle asked me to pull some observations on pricing until after the earnings call that just occurred, and I grudgingly acquiesced. In the interim, more information on Oracle pricing has emerged (including in the comment thread to that post). The original notes are: Oracle disputes some common claims about its [...]

  • Forthcoming Oracle appliances

    Updated: 2011-06-24 07:44:56
    Edit: I checked with Oracle, and it’s indeed TimeTen that’s supposed to be the basis of this new appliance, as per a comment below. That would be less cool, alas. Oracle seems to have said on yesterday’s conference call Oracle OpenWorld (first week in October) will feature appliances based on Tangosol and Hadoop. As I [...]

  • Citrusleaf RTA

    Updated: 2011-06-23 00:20:57
    Citrusleaf has released an add-on product called Citrusleaf RTA (Real-Time Attribution). It’s to be used when: You want to update dashboards within a minute. You want to update predictive models fairly quickly (within the hour?), although it’s not clear to me how much the models are being updated or changed with that latency. The metrics [...]

  • It’s official — the grand central EDW will never happen

    Updated: 2011-06-22 02:54:46
    I pointed out last year that the grand central enterprise data warehouse couldn’t happen; the post started: An enterprise data warehouse should: Manage data to high standards of accuracy, consistency, cleanliness, clarity, and security. Manage all the data in your organization. Pick ONE. IBM’s main theme at the Enzee Universe conference has been to say [...]

  • No, companies are NOT entitled to manage news about themselves

    Updated: 2011-06-21 22:49:21
    Michael Arrington is in another flap, this time for asserting TechCrunch’s right to blindside companies with news. To disagree with him, you almost have to take the stance that companies have some sort of right to manage news about themselves, which I see as pretty ridiculous. Recently, I got into a flap with EMC Greenplum. [...]

  • Book Review: Sharing Hidden Know-How.

    Updated: 2011-06-21 21:27:31
    Kate Pugh has been dealing with hard Enterprise Collaboration issues for years. She uses proven methodologies of “old school” Knowledge Management and Systems Analysis to solve real-world problems. And she recently captured her signature methodology in a book “Sharing Hidden Know-How: How managers solve thorny problems with the knowledge jam”. This review highlights some of [...]

  • The Vertica story (with soundbites!)

    Updated: 2011-06-20 07:14:56
    I’ve blogged separately that: Vertica has a bunch of customers, including seven with 1 or more petabytes of data each. Vertica has progressed down the analytic platform path, with Monday’s release of Vertica 5.0. And of course you know: Vertica (the product) is columnar, MPP, and fast.* Vertica (the company) was recently acquired by HP.** [...]

  • Vertica as an analytic platform

    Updated: 2011-06-20 07:13:18
    Vertica 5.0 is coming out today, and delivering the down payment on Vertica’s analytic platform strategy. In Vertica lingo, there’s now a Vertica SDK (Software Development Kit), featuring Vertica UDT(F)s* (User-Defined Transform Functions). Vertica UDT syntax basics start: In this release, Vertica UDTFs can only be written in C++. Other UDTF languages are promised. Otherwise, [...]

  • Temporal data, time series, and imprecise predicates

    Updated: 2011-06-20 07:11:43
    I’ve been confused about temporal data management for a while, because there are several different things going on. Date arithmetic. This of course has been around for a very long — er, for a very long time. Time-series-aware compression. This has been around for quite a while too. “Time travel”/snapshotting — preserving the state of [...]

  • Columnar DBMS vendor customer metrics

    Updated: 2011-06-20 06:41:54
    Last April, I asked some columnar DBMS vendors to share customer metrics. They answered, but it took until now to iron out a couple of details. Overall, the answers are pretty impressive. Sybase said that Sybase IQ had > 2000 direct customers and >500 indirect customers (i.e., end customers of OEMs). That’s counting by customers; [...]

  • Vulnerability and Web 2.0

    Updated: 2011-06-07 04:26:27

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