Metaphors amok
It all started when I disputed James Kobielus’ blogged claim that Hadoop is the nucleus of the next-generation cloud EDW. Jim posted again to reiterate the claim, only this time he wrote that all EDW vendors [will soon] bring Hadoop into their heart of their architectures. (All emphasis mine.)
That did it. I tweeted, in succession:
- Actually, I vote for Hadoop as the lungs of the EDW — first place of entry for essential nutrients.
- Data integration can be the heart of the EDW, pumping stuff around. RDBMS/analytic platform can be the brain.
- iPad-based dashboards that may engender envy, but which actually are only used occasionally and briefly … well, you get the picture.*
*Woody Allen said in Sleeper that the brain was his second-favorite organ.
Of course, that body of work was quickly challenged. Responses included:
- Re: your metaphor, oxygen is used in the combustion process that turns nutrients into energy, so Hadoop is more mouth-ish* (Seth Grimes)
- Data Quality/Governance can be the liver, filtering out toxins (Josep di Paolantonio)
- what’s nice is that BI (DSS) used to be the colon, but now it’s the Krebs Cycle (Neil Raden)
*Linda agrees with me that oxygen is a nutrient, and she’s taught both physiology and English at the college level.
But seriously, folks — I disagree with Jim’s follow-up post a lot less than I do the first one. He’s still overstating the case, of course, and he still seems confused about how some of the pieces of technology work. Even so, I agree that Hadoop is likely to play an important role in many enterprises’ analytic ecosystems, both for its big bit bucket and parallel analytics capabilities.
Meanwhile, in unrelated puns, Chris Kanaracus and I had something of a pizza party:
“Too many [midsized] businesses’ ideas for slicing data don’t get far past the pie-chart level,” said analyst Curt Monash of Monash Research. “‘Big data’ isn’t even the issue for them; they could get much more value than they do now just from personal-sized data sets.”
That’s not the case with Northeast pizza chain Papa Gino’s, which is using IBM analytics software to crunch business data in many ways, said Martha Lieber, director of business systems for the 280-restaurant company, which also includes a number of D’Angelo sandwich shops.
This work has resulted in some delicious insights …
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