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 from a long trip, July 19, 2016
For starters:
- I spent three weeks in California on a hybrid personal/business trip. I had a bunch of meetings, but not three weeks’ worth.
- The timing was awkward for most companies I wanted to see. No blame accrues to those who didn’t make themselves available.
- I came back with a nasty cough. Follow-up phone calls aren’t an option until next week.
- I’m impatient to start writing. Hence tonight’s posts. But it’s difficult for a man and his cough to be productive at the same time.
A running list of recent posts is:
- As a companion to this post, I’m publishing a very long one on vendor lock-in.
- Spark and Databricks are both prospering, and of course enhancing their technology as well.
- Ditto DataStax.
- Flink is interesting as the streaming technology it’s now positioned to be, rather than the overall Spark alternative it used to be positioned as but which the world didn’t need.
Subjects I’d like to add to that list include:
- MemSQL, Zoomdata, and Neo Technology (also prospering).
- Cloudera (multiple topics, as usual).
- Analytic SQL engines (“traditional” analytic RDBMS aren’t doing well).
- Microsoft’s reinvention (it feels real).
- Metadata (it’s ever more of a thing).
- Machine learning (it’s going to be a big portion of my research going forward).
- Transitions to the cloud — this subject affects almost everything else.
Zoomdata and the Vs
Let’s start with some terminology biases:
- I dislike the term “big data” but like the Vs that define it — Volume, Velocity, Variety and Variability.
- Though I think it’s silly, I understand why BI innovators flee from the term “business intelligence” (they’re afraid of not sounding new).
So when my clients at Zoomdata told me that they’re in the business of providing “the fastest visual analytics for big data”, I understood their choice, but rolled my eyes anyway. And then I immediately started to check how their strategy actually plays against the “big data” Vs.
It turns out that:
- Zoomdata does its processing server-side, which allows for load-balancing and scale-out. Scale-out and claims of great query speed are relevant when data is of high volume.
- Zoomdata depends heavily on Spark.
- Zoomdata’s UI assumes data can be a mix of historical and streaming, and that if looking at streaming data you might want to also check history. This addresses velocity.
- Zoomdata assumes data can be in a variety of data stores, including:
- Relational (operational RDBMS, analytic RDBMS, or SQL-on-Hadoop).
- Files (generic HDFS — Hadoop Distributed File System or S3).*
- NoSQL (MongoDB and HBase were mentioned).
- Search (Elasticsearch was mentioned among others).
- Zoomdata also tries to detect data variability.
- Zoomdata is OEM/embedding-friendly.
*The HDFS/S3 aspect seems to be a major part of Zoomdata’s current story.
Core aspects of Zoomdata’s technical strategy include: Read more