Analyzing the right data
0. A huge fraction of what’s important in analytics amounts to making sure that you are analyzing the right data. To a large extent, “the right data” means “the right subset of your data”.
1. In line with that theme:
- Relational query languages, at their core, subset data. Yes, they all also do arithmetic, and many do more math or other processing than just that. But it all starts with the set theory.
- Underscoring the power of this approach, other data architectures over which analytics is done usually wind up with SQL or “SQL-like” language access as well.
2. Business intelligence interfaces today don’t look that different from what we had in the 1980s or 1990s. The biggest visible* changes, in my opinion, have been in the realm of better drilldown, ala QlikView and then Tableau. Drilldown, of course, is the main UI for business analysts and end users to subset data themselves.
*I used the word “visible” on purpose. The advances at the back end have been enormous, and much of that redounds to the benefit of BI.
3. I wrote 2 1/2 years ago that sophisticated predictive modeling commonly fit the template:
- Divide your data into clusters.
- Model each cluster separately.
That continues to be tough work. Attempts to productize shortcuts have not caught fire.
Cloudera’s Data Science Workbench
0. Matt Brandwein of Cloudera briefed me on the new Cloudera Data Science Workbench. The problem it purports to solve is:
- One way to do data science is to repeatedly jump through the hoops of working with a properly-secured Hadoop cluster. This is difficult.
- Another way is to extract data from a Hadoop cluster onto your personal machine. This is insecure (once the data arrives) and not very parallelized.
- A third way is needed.
Cloudera’s idea for a third way is:
- You don’t run anything on your desktop/laptop machine except a browser.
- The browser connects you to a Docker container that holds (and isolates) a kind of virtual desktop for you.
- The Docker container runs on your Cloudera cluster, so connectivity-to-Hadoop and security are handled rather automagically.
In theory, that’s pure goodness … assuming that the automagic works sufficiently well. I gather that Cloudera Data Science Workbench has been beta tested by 5 large organizations and many 10s of users. We’ll see what is or isn’t missing as more customers take it for a spin.
| Categories: Cloudera, Hadoop, Market share and customer counts, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics | 5 Comments |
Introduction to SequoiaDB and SequoiaCM
For starters, let me say:
- SequoiaDB, the company, is my client.
- SequoiaDB, the product, is the main product of SequoiaDB, the company.
- SequoiaDB, the company, has another product line SequoiaCM, which subsumes SequoiaDB in content management use cases.
- SequoiaDB, the product, is fundamentally a JSON data store. But it has a relational front end …
- … and is usually sold for RDBMS-like use cases …
- … except when it is sold as part of SequoiaCM, which adds in a large object/block store and a content-management-oriented library.
- SequoiaDB’s products are open source.
- SequoiaDB’s largest installation seems to be 2 PB across 100 nodes; that includes block storage.
- Figures for DBMS-only database sizes aren’t as clear, but the sweet spot of the cluster-size range for such use cases seems to be 6-30 nodes.
Also:
- SequoiaDB, the company, was founded in Toronto, by former IBM DB2 folks.
- Even so, it’s fairly accurate to view SequoiaDB as a Chinese company. Specifically:
- SequoiaDB’s founders were Chinese nationals.
- Most of them went back to China.
- Other employees to date have been entirely Chinese.
- Sales to date have been entirely in China, but SequoiaDB has international aspirations
- SequoiaDB has >100 employees, a large majority of which are split fairly evenly between “engineering” and “implementation and technical support”.
- SequoiaDB’s marketing (as opposed to sales) department is astonishingly tiny.
- SequoiaDB cites >100 subscription customers, including 10 in the global Fortune 500, a large fraction of which are in the banking sector. (Other sectors mentioned repeatedly are government and telecom.)
Unfortunately, SequoiaDB has not captured a lot of detailed information about unpaid open source production usage.
Introduction to Crate.io and CrateDB
Crate.io and CrateDB basics include:
- Crate.io makes CrateDB.
- CrateDB is a quasi-RDBMS designed to receive sensor data and similar IoT (Internet of Things) inputs.
- CrateDB’s creators were perhaps a little slow to realize that the “R” part was needed, but are playing catch-up in that regard.
- Crate.io is an outfit founded by Austrian guys, headquartered in Berlin, that is turning into a San Francisco company.
- Crate.io says it has 22 employees and 5 paying customers.
- Crate.io cites bigger numbers than that for confirmed production users, clearly active clusters, and overall product downloads.
In essence, CrateDB is an open source and less mature alternative to MemSQL. The opportunity for MemSQL and CrateDB alike exists in part because analytic RDBMS vendors didn’t close it off.
CrateDB’s not-just-relational story starts:
- A column can contain ordinary values (of usual-suspect datatypes) or “objects”, …
- … where “objects” presumably are the kind of nested/hierarchical structures that are common in the NoSQL/internet-backend world, …
- … except when they’re just BLOBs (Binary Large OBjects).
- There’s a way to manually define “strict schemas” on the structured objects, and a syntax for navigating their structure in WHERE clauses.
- There’s also a way to automagically infer “dynamic schemas”, but it’s simplistic enough to be more suitable for development/prototyping than for serious production.
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data models and architecture, Databricks, Spark and BDAS, GIS and geospatial, MemSQL, NoSQL, Open source, Structured documents | 3 Comments |
DBAs of the future
After a July visit to DataStax, I wrote
The idea that NoSQL does away with DBAs (DataBase Administrators) is common. It also turns out to be wrong. DBAs basically do two things.
- Handle the database design part of application development. In NoSQL environments, this part of the job is indeed largely refactored away. More precisely, it is integrated into the general app developer/architect role.
- Manage production databases. This part of the DBA job is, if anything, a bigger deal in the NoSQL world than in more mature and automated relational environments. It’s likely to be called part of “devops” rather than “DBA”, but by whatever name it’s very much a thing.
That turns out to understate the core point, which is that DBAs still matter in non-RDBMS environments. Specifically, it’s too narrow in two ways.
- First, it’s generally too narrow as to what DBAs do; people with DBA-like skills are also involved in other areas such as “data governance”, “information lifecycle management”, storage, or what I like to call data mustering.
- Second — and more narrowly 🙂 — the first bullet point of the quote is actually incorrect. In fact, the database design part of application development can be done by a specialized person up front in the NoSQL world, just as it commonly is for RDBMS apps.
My wake-up call for that latter bit was a recent MongoDB 3.4 briefing. MongoDB certainly has various efforts in administrative tools, which I won’t recapitulate here. But to my surprise, MongoDB also found a role for something resembling relational database design. The idea is simple: A database administrator defines a view against a MongoDB database, where views: Read more
| Categories: Databricks, Spark and BDAS, Hadoop, MongoDB, NoSQL, Streaming and complex event processing (CEP) | Leave a Comment |
MongoDB 3.4 and “multimodel” query
“Multimodel” database management is a hot new concept these days, notwithstanding that it’s been around since at least the 1990s. My clients at MongoDB of course had to join the train as well, but they’ve taken a clear and interesting stance:
- A query layer with multiple ways to query and analyze data.
- A separate data storage layer in which you have a choice of data storage engines …
- … each of which has the same logical (JSON-based) data structure.
When I pointed out that it would make sense to call this “multimodel query” — because the storage isn’t “multimodel” at all — they quickly agreed.
To be clear: While there are multiple ways to read data in MongoDB, there’s still only one way to write it. Letting that sink in helps clear up confusion as to what about MongoDB is or isn’t “multimodel”. To spell that out a bit further: Read more
| Categories: Database diversity, Emulation, transparency, portability, MongoDB, MySQL, NoSQL, Open source, RDF and graphs, Structured documents, Text | 4 Comments |
Rapid analytics
“Real-time” technology excites people, and has for decades. Yet the actual, useful technology to meet “real-time” requirements remains immature, especially in cases which call for rapid human decision-making. Here are some notes on that conundrum.
1. I recently posted that “real-time” is getting real. But there are multiple technology challenges involved, including:
- General streaming. Some of my posts on that subject are linked at the bottom of my August post on Flink.
- Low-latency ingest of data into structures from which it can be immediately analyzed. That helps drive the (re)integration of operational data stores, analytic data stores, and other analytic support — e.g. via Spark.
- Business intelligence that can be used quickly enough. This is a major ongoing challenge. My clients at Zoomdata may be thinking about this area more clearly than most, but even they are still in the early stages of providing what users need.
- Advanced analytics that can be done quickly enough. Answers there may come through developments in anomaly management, but that area is still in its super-early days.
- Alerting, which has been under-addressed for decades. Perhaps the anomaly management vendors will finally solve it.
2. In early 2011, I coined the phrase investigative analytics, about which I said three main things: Read more
Notes on the transition to the cloud
1. The cloud is super-hot. Duh. And so, like any hot buzzword, “cloud” means different things to different marketers. Four of the biggest things that have been called “cloud” are:
- The Amazon cloud, Microsoft Azure, and their competitors, aka public cloud.
- Software as a service, aka SaaS.
- Co-location in off-premises data centers, aka colo.
- On-premises clusters (truly on-prem or colo as the case may be) designed to run a broad variety of applications, aka private cloud.
Further, there’s always the idea of hybrid cloud, in which a vendor peddles private cloud systems (usually appliances) running similar technology stacks to what they run in their proprietary public clouds. A number of vendors have backed away from such stories, but a few are still pushing it, including Oracle and Microsoft.
This is a good example of Monash’s Laws of Commercial Semantics.
2. Due to economies of scale, only a few companies should operate their own data centers, aka true on-prem(ises). The rest should use some combination of colo, SaaS, and public cloud.
This fact now seems to be widely understood.
“Real-time” is getting real
I’ve been an analyst for 35 years, and debates about “real-time” technology have run through my whole career. Some of those debates are by now pretty much settled. In particular:
- Yes, interactive computer response is crucial.
- Into the 1980s, many apps were batch-only. Demand for such apps dried up.
- Business intelligence should occur at interactive speeds, which is a major reason that there’s a market for high-performance analytic RDBMS.
- Theoretical arguments about “true” real-time vs. near-real-time are often pointless.
- What matters in most cases is human users’ perceptions of speed.
- Most of the exceptions to that rule occur when machines race other machines, for example in automated bidding (high frequency trading or otherwise) or in network security.
A big issue that does remain open is: How fresh does data need to be? My preferred summary answer is: As fresh as is needed to support the best decision-making. I think that formulation starts with several advantages:
- It respects the obvious point that different use cases require different levels of data freshness.
- It cautions against people who think they need fresh information but aren’t in a position to use it. (Such users have driven much bogus “real-time” demand in the past.)
- It covers cases of both human and automated decision-making.
Straightforward applications of this principle include: Read more
Are analytic RDBMS and data warehouse appliances obsolete?
I used to spend most of my time — blogging and consulting alike — on data warehouse appliances and analytic DBMS. Now I’m barely involved with them. The most obvious reason is that there have been drastic changes in industry structure:
- Many of the independent vendors were swooped up by acquisition.
- None of those acquisitions was a big success.
- Microsoft did little with DATAllegro.
- Netezza struggled with R&D after being bought by IBM. An IBMer recently told me that their main analytic RDBMS engine was BLU.
- I hear about Vertica more as a technology to be replaced than as a significant ongoing market player.
- Pivotal open-sourced Greenplum. I have detected few people who care.
- Ditto for Actian’s offerings.
- Teradata claimed a few large Aster accounts, but I never hear of Aster as something to compete or partner with.
- Smaller vendors fizzled too. Hadapt and Kickfire went to Teradata as more-or-less acquihires. InfiniDB folded. Etc.
- Impala and other Hadoop-based alternatives are technology options.
- Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and to some extent SAP/Sybase are still pedaling along … but I rarely talk with companies that big. 🙂
Simply reciting all that, however, begs the question of whether one should still care about analytic RDBMS at all.
My answer, in a nutshell, is:
Analytic RDBMS — whether on premises in software, in the form of data warehouse appliances, or in the cloud — are still great for hard-core business intelligence, where “hard-core” can refer to ad-hoc query complexity, reporting/dashboard concurrency, or both. But they aren’t good for much else.