Blogs
Dai Clegg
Director of Product Marketing
I've been working with databases since the 1980s. For most of that time with Oracle, in the trenches as a consultant, in the ivory tower as a methodologist, in a suit as a marketer, and in the skunk works as a product developer. I finally escaped the Death Star and joined Netezza, mostly to rediscover the joy of a small company with great technology, focused on what customers really want. Then I landed on the Big Blue Planet when Netezza was acquired by IBM. But despite the opportunities at IBM, I still had the start-up bug, so I joined Acunu to explore more of the world of big data - this time in real-time analytics.
The 'Museum Clickers' of Big Data
December 3, 2012
When thinking of use cases for big data analytics, consider your need for immediacy. Do you have the need to know now, not just the ability to know now? In other words, would you do something differently at that moment if you knew the answer immediately?
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Real-time Analytics - Low Latency and High Velocity
October 5, 2012
Well there’s real-time, then there’s real-time, then there’s real-time. As so often with me, this post was first drafted on a plane, and when it comes to in-flight technology, real-time means very real-time. Read More
Crowdsourcing Your Way to Big Data Value
August 21, 2012
Recently, I was in Nice for a three-day gathering of 150 European IBM Big Data specialists. Looking around the room at the opening plenary made me think how fast the world of big data is moving and how quickly our community is growing. Read More
Semi-Structured Data Analytics: Relational or Hadoop Platform? Part 2
August 11, 2012
For some vendors, the only use case for unstructured data is to turn it into structured data to analyze it in a relational database. Read More
Semi-Structured data analytics: Relational or Hadoop platform? Part 1
June 26, 2012
What exactly is 'semi-structured' data? How is it different from relational data? And what about 'structured, but not relational' data? Dai Clegg explains the intricacies of semi-structured data and how it fits into relaitonal or Hadoop platforms. Using an example of a telco seeking affinity analysis, find out how to leverage semi-structured data.
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Exploring Uncharted Data: Is there any insight out there?
June 8, 2012
The biggest table in any Netezza database that I know of has over 600 billion rows!! That’s the claim made by our customer, Catalina Marketing.
So although most of the data in the world is not relational, there is a huge amount of relational data and IBM technologies are more than capable of performing the most complex analytics on it. Netezza has extensive libraries of in-database analytic functions1 to support SPSS, SAS, R and other analytic tools and languages. And the special capability that Netezza has to deal with ad-hoc queries means that if your data is relational, or can be mapped to a relational schema conclusively, like the CDRs I wrote about in a previous post, it is a great platform for analytics. If!
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Big Data: The Data Velocity Discussion
May 15, 2012
If there’s more and more data arriving and time isn’t expandingi, then data must be arriving at greater and greater velocity.
In my last post I talked about Variety in the Volume, Variety, Velocity triumvirate. There’s more to be said about that, but first I’d like to take a run at Velocity. We’ve got used to the idea that you load stuff into a database (or other data store) then you take a look at it. That’s just too slow for lots of operational decision making processes. And if you think about it, as the volume of data available increases the bar is constantly rising on real-time analysis. But for many kinds of decisions, you just need the data that comes with the event you want to decide about: is this a fraudulent transaction? Was this call dropped?
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Big Data: The Data Variety Discussion
May 1, 2012
We'll start from the very beginning. It's a very good place to start...
Big data is all about Velocity, Variety and Volume, and the greatest of these is Variety. At least it causes the greatest misunderstanding.
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US Federal Government and Big Data
April 11, 2012
I tuned into the recent US federal government’s web-cast. I was curious to see what a government big data initiative would look like, as my government (UK) is unlikely to produce anything equivalent any time soon. They and their opponents are too busy trying to prove that they’re not entirely removed from the concerns of the ordinary citizen.
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Business Transformational Analytics Performance, and Cat Food
March 7, 2012
Last week I was in Bucharest and Ljubljana, but before I headed to the airport on Monday I recorded a webinar – doubtless I’ll be blowing my own brass section about how and when you can watch it, when I know that. Usually for webinars, as for other presentations, I have my own slide deck, which is almost always a slight variation of a previous one, but on this occasion I was using a pre-set deck because I was a late substitute for the planned speaker. The deck, as usual, included a bunch of Netezza customer stories, including one I wasn’t familiar so I had some reading to do over the weekend to get acquainted with it.
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