June 27, 2010
Lots of Aster Data analytic packages
A number of vendors had announcements last week, notably:
- Netezza (user conference)
- Aster Data (to steal some of Netezza’s thunder)
- Infobright (so far as I can tell, just because it was time for a product release, and also to get ahead of the summer doldrums)
- Northscale (ditto)
Time to play some catchup.
I’ll start with Aster Data, which added to the list of analytic packages it previously announced, and kindly gave me permission to post a partial slide deck from the briefing on same. Highlights of Aster’s analytic packages story include:
- Statistics, statistics, and more statistics, including:
- A deal with SAS
- A lot of R packages
- Deals with Fuzzy Logix and another partner
- Linear algebra/matrix manipulation, useful in:
- You guessed it — statistics
- Other machine learning
- Optimization
- and more
- Entity and pattern extraction, for example:
- Market basket analysis, which is a great input for — I knew you’d keep up with this — statistics
- Sessionization, ditto
- Text tokenization (presumably pretty basic stuff)
- The versatile nPath package
- Data mining/predictive analytics beyond straight statistics
- More stuff, some of it mentioned in my Aster-sponsored webinars late last year
Like Netezza, Aster is offering functions in two formats:
- Fully parallel — i.e., you can simply invoke them via SQL and they’ll execute in parallel
- Parallel-ready — i.e., you can invoke them on every node of the MPP cluster at once via Aster’s MapReduce framework
There are 30+ of the former and 1000+ of the latter, grouped into 40+ packages.
I will not repeat Aster’s current, confusing terminology for these two categories — hopefully Aster will do some renaming — but you can find same on Slide 6 of the deck linked above.
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[…] Aster Data is generally an exception to this rule, as it should be, since that integration is at the core of its positioning. Even so, in the last paragraph of that link, I called Aster out for what at that time was some product description nonsense, which was specifically in an area that many vendors are confusing about explaining, namely … […]
[…] other hand, Aster Data said it had parallelized logistic regression a year ago. (Slides 6-7 from a mid-2010 Aster deck may be clearer.) I’m guessing Fuzzy Logix might make a similar claim, although I’m not […]
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