The explosion in different data types – including structured and unstructured, Big Data and Fast Data – has resulted in a corresponding increase in databases for many organizations, some of them on-premise and others in the cloud. Realizing this, Dell…
NoSQL databases have grown markedly in popularity over the last few years, and for good reasons. Broadly speaking, NoSQL is proving especially useful in the following two areas of increasing interest to IT organizations: Scaling to handle massive numbers of…
Business intelligence expert Howard Dresner, of Dresner Advisory Services, is bullish on the market for self-service data preparation. Data-savvy business folks who exhaust the capabilities of Excel or get frustrated by Excel’s limitations are graduating to other tools, he told…
For some time now there has been much buzz around the idea of getting more data into the hands of “ordinary” business users. A slew of tools that help users with data preparation and data analysis tasks are entering the…
Over the last two years, the increasing relative cost advantages of Flash memory have driven a new area of competitive advantage in analytics: the ability to deliver real-time and near-real-time analytics on Big Data (aka Fast Data) that comes from…
Sales analytics in traditional CRM systems, like other types of analytics, have largely provided “after the fact” analysis instead of insights that can actually influence outcomes. That is beginning to change, however, with a growing emphasis on real-time information. Clari,…
The ongoing popularity of the Hadoop approach to data management should not blind us to the opportunities offered by other database technologies – technologies that, when used in the proper mix, can deliver adequate scaling to meet the demands of…
Providing the infrastructure for both Big Data and the newer Fast Data is not yet a matter of applying cookie-cutter “best practices.” Both require significant tuning or changing of both hardware and software infrastructure, and the newer Fast Data architectures…
As vendors and users testified at last month’s In-Memory Computing Summit, the relatively low cost of flash memory is driving databases and apps toward leveraging Fast Data – mobile and sensor cloud data – using systems whose storage is predominantly…
For several years Hadoop-based alternatives to traditional SQL databases have been the focus of user attention. After all they are cheap or open source, well versed in public cloud environments and, in many cases, scalable to larger amounts of Big…