What matters in investigative analytics?
In a general pontification on positioning, I wrote:
every product in a category is positioned along the same set of attributes,
and went on to suggest that summary attributes were more important than picky detailed ones. So how does that play out for investigative analytics?
First, summary attributes that matter for almost any kind of enterprise software include:
- Performance and scalability. I write about analytic performance and scalability a lot. Usually that’s in the context of analytic DBMS, but it also arises in analytic stacks such as Platfora, Metamarkets or even QlikView, and also in the challenges of making predictive modeling scale.
- Reliability, availability and security.* This is more crucial for short-request applications than analytic ones, but even your analytic systems shouldn’t leak data or crash.
- Goodness of fit with legacy systems. I hate that one, because enterprises often sacrifice way too much in favor of that benefit.
- Price. Duh.
*I picked up that phrase when — abbreviated as RAS — it was used to characterize the emphasis for Oracle 8. I like it better than a general and ambiguous concept of “enterprise-ready”.
The reason I’m writing this post, however, is to call out two summary attributes of special importance in investigative analytics — which regrettably which often conflict with each other — namely:
- Agility. People don’t want to submit requests for reports or statistical analyses; they want to get answers as soon as the questions come to mind.
- Completeness of feature set — for a particular use case, that is. There’s no such thing as an investigative analytics offering with a feature set that’s close to complete for all purposes; even SAS, IBM and other behemoths fall short.
Much of what I work on boils down to those two subjects. For example: Read more
| Categories: Aster Data, Business intelligence, Data warehousing, KXEN, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, SAS Institute, Teradata | 11 Comments |
ClearStory, Spark, and Storm
ClearStory Data is:
- One of the two start-ups I’m most closely engaged with.
- Run by a CEO for whom I have great regard, but who does get rather annoying about secrecy. 🙂
- On the verge, finally, of fully destealthing.
I think I can do an interesting post about ClearStory while tap-dancing around the still-secret stuff, so let’s dive in.
ClearStory:
- Has developed a full-stack business intelligence technology — which will however be given a snazzier name than “BI” — that is focused on incorporating a broad variety of third-party information, usually along with some of the customer’s own data. Thus, ClearStory …
- … pushes Variety and Variability to extremes, more so than it stresses Volume and Velocity. But it does want to be used at interactive/memory-centric speeds.
- Has put a lot of effort into user interface, but in ways that fit my theory that UI is more about navigation than actual display.
- Has much of its technical differentiation in the area of data mustering …
- … and much of the rest in DBMS-like engineering.
- Is a flagship user of Spark.
- Also relies on Storm, HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and various lesser open source projects (e.g. the ubiquitous Zookeeper).
- Is to a large extent written in Scala.
- Is at this time strictly a multi-tenant SaaS (Software as a Service) offering, except insofar as there’s an on-premises agent to help feed customers’ own data into the core ClearStory cloud service.
To a first approximation, ClearStory ingests data in a system built on Storm (code name: Stormy), dumps it into HDFS, and then operates on it in a system built on Spark (code name: Sparky). Along the way there’s a lot of interaction with another big part of the system, a metadata catalog with no code name I know of. Or as I keep it straight:
- ClearStory’s end-user UI talks mainly to Sparky, and also to the metadata store.
- ClearStory’s administrative UI talks mainly to Stormy, and also to the metadata store.
Visualization or navigation?
I’ve suggested in the past, approximately, that the platform technology side of business intelligence is more significant than the user interface. That formulation, however, doesn’t exactly capture what I believe. To be more precise, let’s differentiate between a couple aspects of business intelligence UI.
It might seem that a lot of the action in business intelligence revolves around ever-better visualization. After all, Tableau is clearly identified as a visualization-centric technology; who’s hotter than Tableau? And numerous other vendors talk of “visualizations” too. But I don’t think that’s exactly right — rather, I see navigation as being a much bigger deal. And unlike most pure visualization, navigation usually depends strongly on underlying platform capabilities.
Examples of what I mean by innovative navigation — all of which have been developed or have gained prominence over the past decade or so — include:
- QlikView’s core behavior — all that associative navigation.
- QlikView’s collaboration, and every other BI collaboration capability I know of.
- ClearStory, although you won’t get to see what I mean until the launch next month.
- BI search or faceted-search UIs. (E.g. Endeca.)
- BI that is launched from operational applications.
| Categories: Business intelligence, Data warehousing, Tableau Software | 8 Comments |
JSON in DB2
There’s a growing trend for DBMS to beef up their support for multiple data manipulation languages (DMLs) or APIs — and there’s a special boom in JSON support, MongoDB-compatible or otherwise. So I talked earlier tonight with IBM’s Bobbie Cochrane about how JSON is managed in DB2.
For starters, let’s note that there are at least four strategies IBM could have used.
- Store JSON in a BLOB (Binary Large OBject) or similar existing datatype. That’s what IBM actually chose.
- Store JSON in a custom datatype, using the datatype extensibility features DB2 has had since the 1990s. IBM is not doing this, and doesn’t see a need to at this time.
- Use DB2 pureXML, along with some kind of JSON/XML translator. DB2 managed JSON this way in the past, via UDFs (User-Defined Functions), but that implementation is superseded by the new BLOB-based approach, which offers better performance in ingest and query alike.
- Shred — to use a term from XML days — JSON into a bunch of relational columns. IBM experimented with this approach, but ultimately rejected it. In dismissing shredding, Bobbie also disdained any immediate support for schema-on-need.
IBM’s technology choices are of course influenced by its use case focus. It’s reasonable to divide MongoDB use cases into two large buckets:
- Hardcore internet and/or machine-generated data, for example from a website.
- Enterprise data aggregation, for example a “360-degree customer view.”
IBM’s DB2 JSON features are targeted at the latter bucket. Also, I suspect that IBM is generally looking for a way to please users who enjoy working on and with their MongoDB skills. Read more
| Categories: Data models and architecture, IBM and DB2, MongoDB, NoSQL, pureXML, Structured documents | 2 Comments |
Thoughts on in-memory columnar add-ons
Oracle announced its in-memory columnar option Sunday. As usual, I wasn’t briefed; still, I have some observations. For starters:
- Oracle, IBM (Edit: See the rebuttal comment below), and Microsoft are all doing something similar …
- … because it makes sense.
- The basic idea is to take the technology that manages indexes — which are basically columns+pointers — and massage it into an actual column store. However …
- … the devil is in the details. See, for example, my May post on IBM’s version, called BLU, outlining all the engineering IBM did around that feature.
- Notwithstanding certain merits of this approach, I don’t believe in complete alternatives to analytic RDBMS. The rise of analytic DBMS oriented toward multi-structured data just strengthens that point.
I’d also add that Larry Ellison’s pitch “build columns to avoid all that index messiness” sounds like 80% bunk. The physical overhead should be at least as bad, and the main saving in administrative overhead should be that, in effect, you’re indexing ALL columns rather than picking and choosing.
Anyhow, this technology should be viewed as applying to traditional business transaction data, much more than to — for example — web interaction logs, or other machine-generated data. My thoughts around that distinction start:
- I argued back in 2011 that traditional databases will wind up in RAM, basically because …
- … Moore’s Law will make it ever cheaper to store them there.
- Still, cheaper != cheap, so this is a technology only to use with your most valuable data — i.e., that transactional stuff.
- These are very tabular technologies, without much in the way of multi-structured data support.
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data warehousing, IBM and DB2, Memory-centric data management, Microsoft and SQL*Server, OLTP, Oracle, SAP AG, Workday | 6 Comments |
Schema-on-need
Two years ago I wrote about how Zynga managed analytic data:
Data is divided into two parts. One part has a pretty ordinary schema; the other is just stored as a huge list of name-value pairs. (This is much like eBay‘s approach with its Teradata-based Singularity, except that eBay puts the name-value pairs into long character strings.) … Zynga adds data into the real schema when it’s clear it will be needed for a while.
What was then the province of a few huge web companies is now poised to be a broader trend. Specifically:
- Relational DBMS are adding or enhancing their support for complex datatypes, to accommodate various kinds of machine-generated data.
- MongoDB-compatible JSON is the flavor of the day on the short-request side, but alternatives include other JSON, XML, other key-value, or text strings.
- It is often possible to index on individual attributes inside the complex datatype.
- The individual attributes inside the complex datatypes amount to virtual columns, which can play similar roles in SQL statements as physical columns do.
- Over time, the DBA may choose to materialize virtual columns as additional physical columns, to boost query performance.
That migration from virtual to physical columns is what I’m calling “schema-on-need”. Thus, schema-on-need is what you invoke when schema-on-read no longer gets the job done. 😉
| Categories: Data models and architecture, Data warehousing, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Schema on need, Structured documents | 10 Comments |
Trends in predictive modeling
I talked with Teradata about a bunch of stuff yesterday, including this week’s announcements in in-database predictive modeling. The specific news was about partnerships with Fuzzy Logix and Revolution Analytics. But what I found more interesting was the surrounding discussion. In a nutshell:
- Teradata is finally seeing substantial interest in in-database modeling, rather than just in-database scoring (which has been important for years) and in-database data preparation (which is a lot like ELT — Extract/Load/transform).
- Teradata is seeing substantial interest in R.
- It seems as if similar groups of customers are interested in both parts of that, such as:
- Usual-suspect consumer marketing sectors (telecom, credit card, retail).*
- Semiconductor manufacturing.**
- Parallelized SAS modeling on Teradata seems to be limited by the small number of algorithms that are parallelized. (SAS scoring, I presume, is a different matter.)
This is the strongest statement of perceived demand for in-database modeling I’ve heard. (Compare Point #3 of my July predictive modeling post.) And fits with what I’ve been hearing about R.
| Categories: EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Parallelization, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, Revolution Analytics, SAS Institute, Telecommunications, Teradata | 1 Comment |
SAP is buying KXEN
First, some quick history.
- I first heard of KXEN 7-8 years ago from Roman Bukary, then of SAP. He positioned KXEN as an easy-to-embed predictive modeling tool, which was getting various interesting partnerships and OEM deals.
- Returning those near-roots, KXEN is being bought (Q4 expected close) by SAP.
- I say “near roots” because KXEN’s original story had something to do with SVMs (Support Vector Machines).
- But that was already old news back in 2006, and KXEN had pivoted to a simpler and more automated modeling approach. Presumably, this ease of modeling was part of the reason for KXEN’s OEM/partnership appeal.
However, I don’t want to give the impression that KXEN is the second coming of Crystal Reports. Most of what I heard about KXEN’s partnership chops, after Roman’s original heads-up, came from Teradata. Even KXEN itself didn’t seem to see that as a major part of their strategy.
And by the way, KXEN is yet another example of my observation that fancy math rarely drives great enterprise software success.
KXEN’s most recent strategies are perhaps best described by contrasting it to the vastly larger SAS. Read more
| Categories: KXEN, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, SAP AG, SAS Institute | 5 Comments |
Layering of database technology & DBMS with multiple DMLs
Two subjects in one post, because they were too hard to separate from each other
Any sufficiently complex software is developed in modules and subsystems. DBMS are no exception; the core trinity of parser, optimizer/planner, and execution engine merely starts the discussion. But increasingly, database technology is layered in a more fundamental way as well, to the extent that different parts of what would seem to be an integrated DBMS can sometimes be developed by separate vendors.
Major examples of this trend — where by “major” I mean “spanning a lot of different vendors or projects” — include:
- The object/relational, aka universal, extensibility features developed in the 1990s for Oracle, DB2, Informix, Illustra, and Postgres. The most successful extensions probably have been:
- Geospatial indexing via ESRI.
- Full-text indexing, notwithstanding questionable features and performance.
- MySQL storage engines.
- MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) analytic RDBMS relying on single-node PostgreSQL, Ingres, and/or Microsoft SQL Server — e.g. Greenplum (especially early on), Aster (ditto), DATAllegro, DATAllegro’s offspring Microsoft PDW (Parallel Data Warehouse), or Hadapt.
- Splits in which a DBMS has serious processing both in a “database” layer and in a predicate-pushdown “storage” layer — most famously Oracle Exadata, but also MarkLogic, InfiniDB, and others.
- SQL-on-HDFS — Hive, Impala, Stinger, Shark and so on (including Hadapt).
Other examples on my mind include:
- Data manipulation APIs being added to key-value stores such as Couchbase and Aerospike.
- TokuMX, the Tokutek/MongoDB hybrid I just blogged about.
- NuoDB’s willing reliance on third-party key-value stores (or HDFS in the role of one).
- FoundationDB’s strategy, and specifically its acquisition of Akiban.
And there are several others I hope to blog about soon, e.g. current-day PostgreSQL.
In an overlapping trend, DBMS increasingly have multiple data manipulation APIs. Examples include: Read more
Tokutek’s interesting indexing strategy
The general Tokutek strategy has always been:
- Write indexes efficiently, which …
- … makes it reasonable to have more indexes, which …
- … lets more queries run fast.
But the details of “writes indexes efficiently” have been hard to nail down. For example, my post about Tokutek indexing last January, while not really mistaken, is drastically incomplete.
Adding further confusion is that Tokutek now has two product lines:
- TokuDB, a MySQL storage engine.
- TokuMX, in which the parts of MongoDB 2.2 that roughly equate to a storage engine are ripped out and replaced with Tokutek code.
TokuMX further adds language support for transactions and a rewrite of MongoDB’s replication code.
So let’s try again. I had a couple of conversations with Martin Farach-Colton, who:
- Is a Tokutek co-founder.
- Stayed in academia.
- Is a data structures guy, not a database expert per se.
The core ideas of Tokutek’s architecture start: Read more
| Categories: Database compression, MongoDB, MySQL, NewSQL, Tokutek and TokuDB | 4 Comments |