If you're looking for a good BI/DW/Analytics focused event, check out the BIWA Summit which takes place in January of 2013. If you're interested in speaking at the event (and you know you are), hurry up and get your abstract in here, it closes tomorrow (November 9th).
Day 1 will give us Tom Kyte who will talk about What's new from Oracle in BI and Data warehousing. Day 2 will feature Vaishnavi Sashikanth, Vice President, Development, Oracle Advanced Analytics at Oracle who will speak on Making Big Data Analytics Accessible.
Jean-Pierre Djicks posted an article yesterday on Big Data: Achieve the Impossible in Real-Time. I actually had a sneak peek at it a couple of weeks ago at the BI Forum...one of the reasons I voted his session as my favorite.
He started out with this slide, as he does in his blog post:
He then went on to talk about how the BMW ORACLE racing team used these metrics to increase performance.
Those gains were incremental and data driven, and they accumulated over years—until the USA could sail at three times the wind speed
'The crew of the USA was the best group of sailors in the world, but they were used to working with sails,' says Burns, 'Then we put them under a wing. Our chief designer, Mike Drummond, told them an airline pilot doesn’t look out the window when he’s flying the plane; he looks at his instruments, and you guys have to do the same thing.'
In other words, use the Force Luke. Or not. Whatever.
Take a look at both articles when you get a chance, well worth your time.
Naturally, the first thing I did was ask the Twitter Machine. It's like sitting in a giant room and yelling out questions to a wide variety of people, in other words, fun.
From the one year older John Piwowar:
Definitely agree with that sentiment. It is just ones and zeros. Lots of it, apparently.
I think my question goes deeper though. I have a pretty good understanding of structured data, i.e. that used by the majority of business applications. You know, you define a data model, it changes over time, no big deal. But...and it's a giant but, what about all that unstructured stuff?
Next up, future beer drinking buddy and obvious fellow smart-ass.
A couple of non-believers stroll in...
I sometimes wonder, do we, as in database people, who work in the data information business, somehow miss the boat on things like Big Data? I can't imagine that's possible. We know the importance of data...is there a disconnect? Is it just me? That ain't a swipe at the above people either.
Gary chimes in with a more...philosophical answer? I've read Gary's stuff for a few years and once in awhile, he just goes way over my head...
Ted comes in and follows up to me:
There were definitely more, but I think these were the highlights for me.
Then it was off to the Google Machine. I love The Google.
Big Data is a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target currently ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set.
An Example:
Examples include web logs, RFID, sensor networks, social networks, Internet text and documents, Internet search indexing, call detail records, genomics, astronomy, biological research, military surveillance, medical records, photography archives, video archives, and large scale eCommerce.
Definitely coming together now...and we're back to John's point, it's just ones and zeros.
I'll let you use The Google Machine yourself as well. Lots of good articles.
For a really quick (4 minutes) primer, here is some dude from O'Reilly
Thanks everyone for their responses on twitter. Definitely helped to clear up some of my confusion.
I meant to write about this sooner...
