Big Data in the Windy City

May 20, 2010

The Aqua building, catty corner from my hotel

Last Tuesday and Wednesday, I attended the TDWI (The Data Warehouse Institute) world conference in Chicago.  The show was a mix of courses and exhibit space.

I went to learn about the BI/Data warehousing segment and scout in preparation for the next conference in August.

Why BI?

My interest in the space comes from the fact that two of the three first partners in our Cloud Partner program are in the Data Warehousing and analytics space: Aster Data and Greenplum.  Both these partners are leveraging highly scaled-out architectures to crunch data.

While there, besides checking out the 24 companies on the exhibit floor, I attended three half-day classes: Developing your BI tool strategy, Cool BI, the latest innovations, Extending BI to support online marketing and Web 2.0.

For other newbies like myself, here are some notes from the first course.

My Notes: The layers of the BI Lifecycle stack

BI Suites:

  • What they do : Query, report, analyze, visualize, alert (front end to the chain)
  • The Big 4:  IBM (Cognos), SAP (Business Objects), Oracle (Hyperion), Microsoft
    • They all bought small players who excelled in the space
    • Usually offer the suites as part of a complete BI lifecycle stack
    • Two of the remaining independents are Microstrategy and SAS

Data Management

  • Data warehouse/mart databases and storage
  • Usually in a RDBMS but also in a dedicated OLAP database
  • Examples: Aster Data, Greenplum, Neteeza, Teradata

Data Integration (aka ETL)

  • They extract, transform and load info from the layer below into the layer above.
  • Examples: Informatica

Operational Apps/Systems

  • Planning, ERP, CRM etc
  • Orders, Invoices, Shipping, Web clicks

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Aster Data’s CEO & Co-founder — Mayank Bawa

April 22, 2010

As part of the Cloud ISV partner program we announced last month, we are working with “big data” player Aster Data.   When I was out for our launch a few weeks back, I met up with Mayank Bawa, CEO and co-founder of Aster Data.  We got together in my hotel lobby and talked about Aster Data, how it came to be, how they tackle Big Data analysis and how Dell and Aster are working together.  Check it out:

Some of the topics Mayank tackles.

  • How Aster came to be:  came out of the research Mayank and his co-founders were doing at Standford.   They even got seed funding from their professor who had also Google and VMware get their starts when they were projects at Stanford.
  • Aster’s approach: build a data infrastructure that can not only store large amounts of data but also has enough compute power to analyze that data.
  • Tying Map Reduce closely to SQL to produce a language called SQL map reduce.  This allows apps to be run right where the data is stored and managed. The Map Reduce framework allows to apps to be expressed in a variety of languages e.g. Java, Perl, Python, C++.
  • How Aster and Dell are working together:  Bringing a MPP (massive parallel processing) data warehouse infrastructure to their customers.   Building one blueprint so customers can create a self service data warehouse and another to set up infrastructure for big data analytics.

Extra-credit reading:

Press release: Aster Data Introduces New Cloud Solution for Data Warehousing and Advanced Analytics

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George