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This is the second and the last part of this two-post series blog post on Big Data myths. If you haven't read the first part, check it out here . Myth # 2: Big Data is an old wine in new bottle I hear people say, "Oh, that Big Data, we used to call it BI." One of the main challenges with legacy BI has been that you pretty much have to know what you're looking for based on a limited set of data sources that are available to you. The so called "intelligence" is people going around gathering, cleaning, staging, and analyzing data to create pre-canned "reports and dashboards" to answer a few very specific narrow questions. By the time the question is answered its value has been diluted. These restrictions manifested from the fact that the computational power was still scarce and the industry lacked sophisticated frameworks and algorithms to actually make sense out of data. Traditional BI introduced redundancies at many levels such as staging, cubes etc...

It was cloud then and it's Big Data now. Every time there's a new disruptive category it creates a lot of confusion. These categories are not well-defined. They just catch on. What hurts the most is the myths. This is the first part of my two-part series to debunk Big Data myths. Myth # 4: Big Data is about big data It's a clear misnomer. "Big Data" is a name that sticks but it's not just about big data. Defining a category just based on size of data appears to be quite primitive and rather silly. And, you could argue all day about what size of data qualifies as "big." But, the name sticks, and that counts. The insights could come from a very small dataset or a very large data set. Big Data is finally a promise not to discriminate any data, small or large. It has been prohibitively expensive and almost technologically impossible to analyze large volumes of data. Not any more. Today, technology — commodity hardware and sophisticated software to levera...

A few months back, I was helping a very large customer of ours to help simplify as well as automate their process of trading financial instruments. During one of my many visits to their office, I met a person who was trying to explain to me his job in supporting the people that are involved in this super complex process. I always ask a lot of questions — until they're totally annoyed and ready to kick me out of the room — to get a complete understanding of the business rationale behind whatever they're thriving for and their personal motivation behind it. Something unusual happened at this meeting. Instead of getting into the gory technical details of how they get things done, he chose to tell me a short and simple story. "You know, um.. there's this early morning meeting everyday that Peter goes to with a bunch of other people. They all gather around a large table in a dimly lit conference room with a bunch of printed spreadsheets, a laptop, and a large calculator. Pe...

Today, Cloudera announced a new $40m funding round to scale their sales and marketing efforts and a partnership with NetApp where NetApp will resell Cloudera's Hadoop as part of their solution portfolio. These both announcements are critical to where the cloud and Big Data are headed. Big Data going mainstream: Hadoop and MapReduce are not only meant for Google, Yahoo, and fancy Silicon Valley start-ups. People have recognized that there's a wider market for Hadoop for consumer as well as enterprise software applications. As I have argued before Hadoop and Cloud is a match made in heaven. I blogged about Cloudera and the rising demand of data-centric massive parallel processing almost 2.5 years back, Obviously, we have come a long way. The latest Hadoop conference is completely sold out. It's good to see the early signs of Hadoop going mainstream. I am expecting to see similar success for companies such as Datastax (previously Riptano) which is a "Cloudera for Cass...

Check out the Part 1 if you haven’t already read it to better understand the context and my disclaimer. This is the Part 2 covering the assertions from 6 to 10. Assertion 6: Appliances should be "software only." “In my 40 years of experience as a computer science professional in the DBMS field, I have yet to see a specialized hardware architecture—a so-called database machine—that wins.” This is a black swan effect ; just because someone hasn’t seen an event occur in his or her lifetime, it doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. This statement could also be re-written as “In my 40 years of experience, I have yet to see a social network that is used by 500 million people.” You get the point. I am the first one who would vote in favor of commodity hardware against a specialized hardware, but there are very specific reasons why the specialized hardware makes sense in some cases. “In other words, one can buy general purpose CPU cycles from the major chip vendors or specialized CPU c...

I have tremendous respect for Michael Stonebraker. He is an apt visionary. What I like the most about him is his drive and passion to commercialize the academic concepts. ACM recently published his article “ My Top 10 Assertions About Data Warehouses ." If you haven’t read it, I would encourage you to read it. I agree with some of his assertions and disagree with a few. I am grounded in reality, but I do have a progressive viewpoint on this topic. This is my attempt to bring an alternate perspective to the rapidly changing BI world that I am seeing. I hope the readers take it as constructive criticism. This post has been sitting in my draft folder for a while. I finally managed to publish it. This is Part 1 covering the assertions 1 to 5. The Part 2 with the rest of the assertions will follow in a few days. “Please note that I have a financial interest in several database companies, and may be biased in a number of different ways.” I appreciate Stonebraker’s disclaimer. I do belie...

Actual numbers vary based on whom you ask, but the general consensus is that the Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics in the cloud is a fast growing market. IDC expects a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.4% through 2013. This growth is primarily driven by two kinds of SaaS applications. The first kind is a purpose-specific analytics-driven application for business processes such as financial planning, cost optimization, inventory analysis etc. The second kind is a self-service horizontal analytics application/tool that allows the customers and ISVs to analyze data and create, embed, and share analysis and visualizations. The category that is still nascent and would require significant work is the traditional general-purpose BI on large data warehouses (DW) in the cloud. For the most enterprises, not only all the DW are on-premise, but the majority of the business systems that feed data into these DW are on-premise as well. If these enterprises were to adopt BI in the clou...