Insights and Must-Knows
from the Big Data Blog

Rosaria Silipo discusses her use of Actian RushAnalytics to tackle a time-sensitive big data project. Using RushAnalytics, she found the results to be "amazing." The execution time of the whole workflow went down from circa 3 days to one hour and 16 minutes! Read more about this interesting KNIME big data project.

In my last blog post, I suggested that integrating a big data pilot involved developing a program plan consisting of multiple work streams focusing on architecture and design, hardware/software/data infrastructure, data management, and system configuration and management. At the same time, a critical change management task is to socialize and then develop skills for big data application development, and essentially make Big Data application development part of the information strategy...

Door64, Austin’s largest professional technology organization, recently held its first “Big Data & Analytics” Speaker Series and Exhibit. The event served as another proof point that Austin continues to become a leading big data city. A number of comments, in fact, were made about the high level of big data and Hadoop knowledge among attendees...

“Bow your head: the hot buzzword big data has ascended to royalty,” declared Eric Siegel, in his book Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die.  “It’s in every news clip, every data science presentation, and every advertisement for analytics solutions.  It’s a crisis!  It’s an opportunity!  It’s a crisis of opportunity!” Siegel then shares a big secret about big data...

Don’t work with a monstrosity when the future of big data analytics is here now. Tame the Horror of Exploding Data Volumes with a lot less stress and expense – and get the answers to the questions you want to ask, fast enough to save your world...

These days the capabilities for processing and analyzing big data are not just high tech luxury for large companies – online retailers of all sizes can take advantage of big data insights due to many cost-effective options both for on-premises and in the cloud. “Big data” doesn’t simply mean large volumes of data – it’s more about data that is difficult to process and analyze through traditional methods. All businesses potentially have “big data” in one form or another that could yield significant or even game-changing insight. The starting point for any company is developing a strategy and the right questions that can be answered by big data analysis...

Actian Corporation’s recent acquisition activity grabbed TDWI’s (The Data Warehousing Institute) attention.  Following the acquisitions of Pervasive Software, ParAccel and VectorWise, TDWI’s Steve Swoyer interviewed Actian’s CTO Mike Hoskins (formerly Pervasive’s CTO) to get a bead on where the company is headed post acquisition...

In their recent Harvard Business Review blog post, Jeff Bladt and Bob Filbin explained a data scientist’s real job is storytelling.  “Data gives you the what, but humans know the why.  Without a human frame, data will only confuse, and certainly won’t lead to smart organizational behavior.  The best business decisions come from intuitions and insights informed by data.  Data scientists want to believe that data has all the answers.  But the most important part of our job is qualitative: asking questions, creating directives from our data, and telling its story.” Read more...