Technical differentiation
I commonly write about real or apparent technical differentiation, in a broad variety of domains. But actually, computers only do a couple of kinds of things:
- Accept instructions.
- Execute them.
And hence almost all IT product differentiation fits into two buckets:
- Easier instruction-giving, whether that’s in the form of a user interface, a language, or an API.
- Better execution, where “better” usually boils down to “faster”, “more reliable” or “more reliably fast”.
As examples of this reductionism, please consider:
- Application development is of course a matter of giving instructions to a computer.
- Database management systems accept and execute data manipulation instructions.
- Data integration tools accept and execute data integration instructions.
- System management software accepts and executes system management instructions.
- Business intelligence tools accept and execute instructions for data retrieval, navigation, aggregation and display.
Similar stories are true about application software, or about anything that has an API (Application Programming Interface) or SDK (Software Development Kit).
Yes, all my examples are in software. That’s what I focus on. If I wanted to be more balanced in including hardware or data centers, I might phrase the discussion a little differently — but the core points would still remain true.
What I’ve said so far should make more sense if we combine it with the observation that differentiation is usually restricted to particular domains. Read more
| Categories: Business intelligence, Data warehousing, Hadoop, Teradata | 4 Comments |
Notes on predictive modeling, November 2, 2014
Following up on my notes on predictive modeling post from three weeks ago, I’d like to tackle some areas of recurring confusion.
Why are we modeling?
Ultimately, there are two reasons to model some aspect of your business:
- You generally want insight and understanding.
- This is analogous to why you might want to do business intelligence.
- It commonly includes a search for causality, whether or not “root cause analysis” is exactly the right phrase to describe the process.
- You want to do calculations from the model to drive wholly or partially automated decisions.
- A big set of examples can be found in website recommenders and personalizers.
- Another big set of examples can be found in marketing campaigns.
- For an example of partial automation, consider a tool that advises call center workers.
How precise do models need to be?
Use cases vary greatly with respect to the importance of modeling precision. If you’re doing an expensive mass mailing, 1% additional accuracy is a big deal. But if you’re doing root cause analysis, a 10% error may be immaterial.
Who is doing the work?
It is traditional to have a modeling department, of “data scientists” or SAS programmers as the case may be. While it seems cool to put predictive modeling straight in the hands of business users — some business users, at least — it’s rare for them to use predictive modeling tools more sophisticated than Excel. For example, KXEN never did all that well.
That said, I support the idea of putting more modeling in the hands of business users. Just be aware that doing so is still a small business at this time.
“Operationalizing” predictive models
The topic of “operationalizing” models arises often, and it turns out to be rather complex. Usually, to operationalize a model, you need: Read more
| Categories: Predictive modeling and advanced analytics | 4 Comments |
Analytics for lots and lots of business users
A common marketing theme in the 2010s decade has been to claim that you make analytics available to many business users, as opposed to your competition, who only make analytics available to (pick one):
- Specialists (with “PhD”s).
- Fewer business users (a thinner part of the horizontally segmented pyramid — perhaps inverted — on your marketing slide, not to be confused with the horizontally segmented pyramids — perhaps inverted — on your competition’s marketing slides).
Versions of this claim were also common in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.
Some of that is real. In particular:
- Early adoption of analytic technology is often in line-of-business departments.
- Business users on average really do get more numerate over time, my three favorite examples of that being:
- Statistics is taught much more in business schools than it used to be.
- Statistics is taught much more in high schools than it used to be.
- Many people use Excel.
Even so, for most analytic tools, power users tend to be:
- People with titles or roles like “business analyst”.
- More junior folks pulling things together for their bosses.
- A hardcore minority who fall into neither of the first two categories.
Asserting otherwise is rarely more than marketing hype.
Related link
- “Freeing business analysts from IT” (August, 2014)
| Categories: Predictive modeling and advanced analytics | 3 Comments |
Datameer at the time of Datameer 5.0
Datameer checked in, having recently announced general availability of Datameer 5.0. So far as I understood, Datameer is still clearly in the investigative analytics business, in that:
- Datameer does business intelligence, but not at human real-time speeds. Datameer query durations are sometimes sub-minute, but surely not sub-second.
- Datameer also does lightweight predictive analytics/machine learning — k-means clustering, decision trees, and so on.
Key aspects include:
- Datameer runs straight against Hadoop.
- Like many other analytic offerings, Datameer is meant to be “self-service”, for line-of-business business analysts, and includes some “data preparation”. Datameer also has had some data profiling since Datameer 4.0.
- The main way of interacting with Datameer seems to be visual analytic programming. However, I Datameer has evolved somewhat away from its original spreadsheet metaphor.
- Datameer’s primitives resemble those you’d find in SQL (e.g. JOINs, GROUPBYs). More precisely, that would be SQL with a sessionization extension; e.g., there’s a function called GROUPBYGAP.
- Datameer lets you write derived data back into Hadoop.
| Categories: Business intelligence, Databricks, Spark and BDAS, Datameer, Hadoop, Log analysis, Market share and customer counts, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, Web analytics | 7 Comments |
Is analytic data management finally headed for the cloud?
It seems reasonable to wonder whether analytic data management is headed for the cloud. In no particular order:
- Amazon Redshift appears to be prospering.
- So are some SaaS (Software as a Service) business intelligence vendors.
- Amazon Elastic MapReduce is still around.
- Snowflake Computing launched with a cloud strategy.
- Cazena, with vague intentions for cloud data warehousing, destealthed.*
- Cloudera made various cloud-related announcements.
- Data is increasingly machine-generated, and machine-generated data commonly originates off-premises.
- The general argument for cloud-or-at-least-colocation has compelling aspects.
- Analytic workloads can be “bursty”, and so could benefit from true cloud elasticity.
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, Data warehousing, Netezza | 3 Comments |
Snowflake Computing
I talked with the Snowflake Computing guys Friday. For starters:
- Snowflake is offering an analytic DBMS on a SaaS (Software as a Service) basis.
- The Snowflake DBMS is built from scratch (as opposed, to for example, being based on PostgreSQL or Hadoop).
- The Snowflake DBMS is columnar and append-only, as has become common for analytic RDBMS.
- Snowflake claims excellent SQL coverage for a 1.0 product.
- Snowflake, the company, has:
- 50 people.
- A similar number of current or past users.
- 5 referenceable customers.
- 2 techie founders out of Oracle, plus Marcin Zukowski.
- Bob Muglia as CEO.
Much of the Snowflake story can be summarized as cloud/elastic/simple/cheap.*
*Excuse me — inexpensive. Companies rarely like their products to be labeled as “cheap”.
In addition to its purely relational functionality, Snowflake accepts poly-structured data. Notes on that start:
- Ingest formats are JSON, XML or AVRO for now.
- I gather that the system automagically decides which fields/attributes are sufficiently repeated to be broken out as separate columns; also, there’s a column for the documents themselves.
I don’t know enough details to judge whether I’d call that an example of schema-on-need.
A key element of Snowflake’s poly-structured data story seems to be lateral views. I’m not too clear on that concept, but I gather: Read more
Cloudera’s announcements this week
This week being Hadoop World, Cloudera naturally put out a flurry of press releases. In anticipation, I put out a context-setting post last weekend. That said, the gist of the news seems to be:
- Cloudera continued to improve various aspects of its product line, especially Impala with a Version 2.0. Good for them. One should always be making one’s products better.
- Cloudera announced a variety of partnerships with companies one would think are opposed to it. Not all are Barney. I’m now hard-pressed to think of any sustainable-looking relationship advantage Hortonworks has left in the Unix/Linux world. (However, I haven’t heard a peep about any kind of Cloudera/Microsoft/Windows collaboration.)
- Cloudera is getting more cloud-friendly, via a new product — Cloudera Director. Probably there are or will be some cloud-services partnerships as well.
Notes on Cloudera Director start:
- It’s closed-source.
- Code and support are included in any version of Cloudera Enterprise.
- It’s a management tool. Indeed, Cloudera characterized it to me as a sort of manager of Cloudera Managers.
What I have not heard is any answer for the traditional performance challenge of Hadoop-in-the-cloud, which is:
- Hadoop, like most analytic RDBMS, tightly couples processing and storage in a shared-nothing way.
- Standard cloud architectures, however, decouple them, thus mooting a considerable fraction of Hadoop performance engineering.
Maybe that problem isn’t — or is no longer — as big a deal as I’ve been told.
| Categories: Cloud computing, Cloudera, Hadoop, Hortonworks | 15 Comments |
Context for Cloudera
Hadoop World/Strata is this week, so of course my clients at Cloudera will have a bunch of announcements. Without front-running those, I think it might be interesting to review the current state of the Cloudera product line. Details may be found on the Cloudera product comparison page. Examining those details helps, I think, with understanding where Cloudera does and doesn’t place sales and marketing focus, which given Cloudera’s Hadoop market stature is in my opinion an interesting thing to analyze.
So far as I can tell (and there may be some errors in this, as Cloudera is not always accurate in explaining the fine details):
- CDH (Cloudera Distribution … Hadoop) contains a lot of Apache open source code.
- Cloudera has a much longer list of Apache projects that it thinks comprise “Core Hadoop” than, say, Hortonworks does.
- Specifically, that list currently is: Hadoop, Flume, HCatalog, Hive, Hue, Mahout, Oozie, Pig, Sentry, Sqoop, Whirr, ZooKeeper.
- In addition to those projects, CDH also includes HBase, Impala, Spark and Cloudera Search.
- Cloudera Manager is closed-source code, much of which is free to use. (I.e., “free like beer” but not “free like speech”.)
- Cloudera Navigator is closed-source code that you have to pay for (free trials and the like excepted).
- Cloudera Express is Cloudera’s favorite free subscription offering. It combines CDH with the free part of Cloudera Manager. Note: Cloudera Express was previously called Cloudera Standard, and that terminology is still reflected in parts of Cloudera’s website.
- Cloudera Enterprise is the umbrella name for Cloudera’s three favorite paid offerings.
- Cloudera Enterprise Basic Edition contains:
- All the code in CDH and Cloudera Manager, and I guess Accumulo code as well.
- Commercial licenses for all that code.
- A license key to use the entirety of Cloudera Manager, not just the free part.
- Support for the “Core Hadoop” part of CDH.
- Support for Cloudera Manager. Note: Cloudera is lazy about saying this explicitly, but it seems obvious.
- The code for Cloudera Navigator, but that’s moot, as the corresponding license key for Cloudera Navigator is not part of the package.
- Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub Edition contains:
- Everything in Cloudera Basic Edition.
- A license key for Cloudera Navigator.
- Support for all of HBase, Accumulo, Impala, Spark, Cloudera Search and Cloudera Navigator.
- Cloudera Enterprise Flex Edition contains everything in Cloudera Basic Edition, plus support for one of the extras in Data Hub Edition.
In analyzing all this, I’m focused on two particular aspects:
- The “zero, one, many” system for defining the editions of Cloudera Enterprise.
- The use of “Data Hub” as a general marketing term.
| Categories: Cloudera, Data warehousing, Databricks, Spark and BDAS, Hadoop, HBase, Hortonworks, Open source, Pricing | 2 Comments |
Notes on predictive modeling, October 10, 2014
As planned, I’m getting more active in predictive modeling. Anyhow …
1. I still believe most of what I said in a July, 2013 predictive modeling catch-all post. However, I haven’t heard as much subsequently about Ayasdi as I had expected to.
2. The most controversial part of that post was probably the claim:
I think the predictive modeling state of the art has become:
- Cluster in some way.
- Model separately on each cluster.
In particular:
- It is always possible to instead go with a single model formally.
- A lot of people think accuracy, ease-of-use, or both are better served by a true single-model approach.
- Conversely, if you have a single model that’s pretty good, it’s natural to look at the subset of the data for which it works poorly and examine that first. Voila! You’ve just done a kind of clustering.
3. Nutonian is now a client. I just had my first meeting with them this week. To a first approximation, they’re somewhat like KXEN (sophisticated math, non-linear models, ease of modeling, quasi-automagic feature selection), but with differences that start: Read more
| Categories: Ayasdi, Databricks, Spark and BDAS, Log analysis, Nutonian, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, Revolution Analytics, Scientific research, Web analytics | 9 Comments |
Spark vs. Tez, revisited
I’m on record as noting and agreeing with an industry near-consensus that Spark, rather than Tez, will be the replacement for Hadoop MapReduce. I presumed that Hortonworks, which is pushing Tez, disagreed. But Shaun Connolly of Hortonworks suggested a more nuanced view. Specifically, Shaun tweeted thoughts including:
Tez vs Spark = Apples vs Oranges.
Spark is general-purpose engine with elegant APIs for app devs creating modern data-driven apps, analytics, and ML algos.
Tez is a framework for expressing purpose-built YARN-based DAGs; its APIs are for ISVs & engine/tool builders who embed it
[For example], Hive embeds Tez to convert its SQL needs into purpose-built DAGs expressed optimally and leveraging YARN
That said, I haven’t yet had a chance to understand what advantages Tez might have over Spark in the use cases that Shaun relegates it to.
Related link
- The Twitter discussion with Shaun was a spin-out from my research around streaming for Hadoop.