Column stores: The future of analytics

The most common myth pertain to BigData is considering BigData and Hadoop as synonymous. Data in most business cases is structured and small enough to fit in a hard disc. In very extreme cases (think FB/Google level) is the data larger than something that cannot fit into a hard-disc.… Continue reading

Death of OLAP cubes

At one point analytics meant MIS and MIS meant OLAP Cubes. For the uninitiated, OLAP is online analytics processing and OLAP cubes are aggregated cuts of various business KPIs across different time and business factor dimensions. A simple example could be sales across different products, geographies and different months.… Continue reading

Functional Thinking for Analytics and Machine Learning

Object oriented (OO) has dominated programming design patterns for quite sometime now. In the initial stages of web development and mobile apps, the main requirement was to extract, store and present data. OO is considered ideal for this. AS move away from basic data representation and expect more from computing i.e.… Continue reading

Self Services Sales Analytics

Typical problems of sales analytics can be easily solved using self service analytics.  The broad demands from sales analytics are:

  • Business intelligence
  • Discovery: Analytics of trends and causation analysis
  • Predictive analytics at overall level
  • Customer level descriptive and predictive analytics

All of these need to be delivered in a timely fashion to the business user.… Continue reading

Strategic, Tactical and Operational Insighting

Decisions in organizations are made at strategic, tactical and operational level. Analytics for generating insights to take decisions also need to be done at these three levels. The difference between these three will be the time-frame and scope of the impact of decisions.… Continue reading

Strategic, Tactical and Operational Insighting

Decisions in organizations are made at strategic, tactical and operational level. Analytics for generating insights to take decisions also need to be done at these three levels. The difference between these three will be the time-frame and scope of the impact of decisions.… Continue reading

Robo-Data-Scientists

eck

This cartoon was drawn by Jon Carter.

Data scientists and analytics professionals have been the new supermen. But the party didnt last long as automation tools will replace manual data analysis soon. The cartoon was inspired by a recent post: Six Very Clear Signs That Your Job Is Due To Be Automated.… Continue reading

Self-service Analytics

Democratising data is the buzz word in analytics right now. I want to extend the concept to say analytics has to be democratised as well. Right now teams in business rely primarily on an analytics or a BI team for all their analytical requirements.… Continue reading

Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy: Nature of Meaning

In continuation of this series on AI and philosophy, here I want to about the nature of meaning. As humans we easily interpret language and extract meaning out of sentences. Transferring this skill to machines has been a hot topic recently.… Continue reading

FAST vs. Other Architectures

FAST vs. REST

FAST RESTful
Resources and functions are two different ways to access the functionality of server Everything is a resource
Functional calls will not have side effects in FAST architecture Any call can have side effects
A function can be accessed through “parameters” Access is through get and post to resources.
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Functional, Augmented State Transfer

Following up on previous two posts, we propose a new architecture for combining functional paradigm with RESTful programming. We name it FAST architecture.

fast

Role of each piece of the FAST server is described below:

  • REST API provides a mechanism to post, update, delete and get resources.
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Functional Augmentation to RESTful paradigm

Continuing on the previous posts, RESTful paradigm treats everything as a resource (data and functions both). Any methods applied on a REST server will modify the state and subsequent methods can yield different results. This is not compatible with functional style.… Continue reading