InformationWeek on Big Data

An article by Doug Henschen in August's InformationWeek describes well the changes facing the world of data warehousing in the enterprise.

"Two forces define this era: size and speed. And those forces are driving companies to consider new choices for how they deal with data."

The full article, available as a PDF, surveys the development of software and hardware, highlighting trends such as:

• In-database analytics
• Hadoop and NoSQL
• MPP offerings of Oracle, IBM and Microsoft
• SAS and Teradata
• In-memory analysis and SSD

Henschen's article contains a couple of reasons why the Strata conference is going to be a must-attend event. First, he talks about the pressure on data science professionals to deliver

Speed is sometimes about pure performance, as in how quickly a system answers a query, but more important is the broad notion of "speed to insight." That's about how much time people--often statistician-analyst-type people--must spend loading data and tuning for performance. The pressure is on IT to get insights out of ever-larger data sets--faster.

And to conclude, he reiterates how quickly the field of data is moving.

Six to nine months. If you're not exploring your options that often, you're probably falling behind.

Tags: media, big_data, informationweek, data_warehousing