About one year ago, Teradata Aster launched a powerful new way of integrating a database with Hadoop. With Aster SQL-H™, users of the Teradata Aster Discovery Platform got the ability to issue SQL and SQL-MapReduce^® queries directly on Hadoop data as if that data had been in Aster all along. This level of simplicity and performance was unprecedented, and it enabled BI & SQL analysts that knew nothing about Hadoop to access Hadoop data and discover new information through Teradata Aster.

This innovation was not a one-off. Teradata has put forward the most complete vision for a data and analytics architecture in the 21st century. We call that the Unified Data Architecture™. The UDA combines Teradata, Teradata Aster & Hadoop into a best-of-breed, tightly integrated ecosystem of workload-specific platforms that provide customers the most powerful and cost-effective environment for their analytical needs. With Aster SQL-H™, Teradata provided a level of software integration between Aster & Hadoop that was, and still is, unchallenged in the industry.

Teradata Unified Data Architecture™

Today, Teradata makes another leap in making its Unified Data Architecture™ vision a reality. We are announcing SQL-H™ for Teradata, bringing the best SQL engine for data warehousing and analytics to Hadoop. From now on, Enterprises that use Hadoop to store large amounts of data will be able to utilize Teradata’s analytics and data warehousing capabilities to directly query Hadoop data securely through ANSI standard SQL and BI tools by leveraging the open source Hortonworks HCatalog project. This is fundamentally the best and tightest integration between a data warehouse engine and Hadoop that exists in the market today. Let me explain why.

It is interesting to consider Teradata’s approach versus alternatives. If one wants to execute SQL on Hadoop, with the intent of building Data Warehouses out of Hadoop data, there are not many realistic options. Most databases have a very poor integration with Hadoop, and require Hadoop experts to manage the overall system – not a viable option for most Enterprises due to cost. SQL-H™ removes this requirement for Teradata/Hadoop deployments. Another “option” are the SQL-on-Hadoop tools that have started to emerge; but unfortunately, there are about a decade away from becoming sufficiently mature to handle true Data Warehousing workloads. Finally, the approach of taking a database and shoving it inside Hadoop has significant issues since it suffers from the worst of both worlds – Hadoop activity has to be limited so that it doesn’t disrupt the database, data is duplicated between HDFS and the database store, and performance of the database is less compared to a stand–alone version.

In contrast, a Teradata/Hadoop deployment with SQL-H™ offers the best of both worlds: unprecedented performance and reliability in the Teradata layer; seamless BI & SQL access to Hadoop data via SQL-H™; and it frees up Hadoop to perform data processing tasks at full efficiency.

Teradata is committed to being the strategic advisor of the Enterprise when it comes to Data Warehousing and Big Data. Through its Unified Data Architecture™ and today’s announcement on Teradata SQL-H™, it provides even more performance, flexibility and cost-effective options to Enterprises eager to use data as a competitive advantage.

Ever since Aster Data became part of Teradata a couple years ago, we have been fortunate to have the resources and focus to accelerate our rate of product innovation. In the past 8 months alone, we have led the market in deploying big analytics on Hadoop and introducing an ultra-fast appliance for discovering big data insights. Our focus is to provide the market with the best big data discovery platform; that is, the most efficient, cost-effective, and enterprise-friendly way to extract valuable business insights form massive piles of structured and unstructured data.

Today I am excited to announce another significant innovation that extends our lead in this direction. For the first time, we are introducing in-database, SQL-MapReduce-based visualization functions, as part of the Teradata Aster Discovery Platform 5.10 software release. These are functions that take the output of an analytical process (either SQL or MapReduce) and create an interactive data visualization that can be accessed directly from our platform through any web browser. There are several functions that we are introducing with today’s announcement, including functions that let you visualize flows of people or events, graphs, and arbitrary patterns. These functions complement your existing BI solution by extending the types of information you can visualize without adding the complexity of another BI deployment.

It did take some significant engineering effort and innovation from our field in working with customers to make a discovery platform produce in-database, in-process visualizations. So, why bother? Because these functions have three powerful characteristics: they are beautiful; powerful; and instant. Let me elaborate in reverse order.

Instant: the goal of a discovery platform like Aster’s is to accelerate the hypothesis –> analysis –> validation iteration process. One of the major big data challenges is that the data is so complex that you don’t even know what questions to ask. So you start with 10s or 100s of possible questions that you need to quickly implement and validate until you find the couple questions that extract the gold nuggets of information from the data. Besides analyzing the data, having access to instant visualizations can help data scientists and business analysts understand if they are down the right path of finding the insights they’re looking for. Being able to rapidly analyze and – now – visualize the insights in-process can rapidly accelerate the discovery cycle and save an analysts time and cost by more than 80% as has been recently validated.    

Powerful: Aster comes with a broad library of pre-built SQL-MapReduce functions. Some of the most powerful, like nPath, crunch terabytes of customer or event data and produce patterns of activity that yield significant insights in a single pass of the data, regardless of the complexity of the pattern or history being analyzed. In the past, visualizing these insights required a lot of work – even after the insight was generated. This is because there were no specialized visualization tools that could consume the insight as-is to produce the visualizations. Abstracting the insights in order to visualize them is sub-optimal since it is killing the ‘a-ha!’ moment. With today’s announcement, we provide analysts with the ability to natively visualize concepts such as a graph of interactions or patterns of customer behavior with no compromises and no additional effort!

Beautiful: We all know that numbers and data are only as good as the story that goes with them. By having access to instant, powerful and also aesthetically beautiful in-database visualizations, you can do justice to your insights and communicate them effectively to the rest of the organization, whether that means business clients, executives, or peer analysts.

In addition, with this announcement we are introducing four buckets of pre-built SQL-MapReduce functions, I.e. Java functions that can be accessed through a familiar SQL or BI interface. These buckets are Data Acquisition (connecting to external sources and acquiring data); Data Preparation (manipulate structured and unstructured data to quickly prepare for analysis); Data Analytics (everything from path and pattern analysis to statistics and marketing analytics); and Data Visualization (introduced today). This is the most powerful collection of big data tools available in the industry today, and we’re proud to provide them to our customers.

Teradata Aster Discovery Portfolio

Our belief is that our industry is still scratching the surface in terms of providing powerful analytical tools to enterprises that help them find more valuable insights, more quickly and more easily. With today’s launch, the Teradata Aster Discovery Platform reconfirms its lead as the most powerful and enterprise-friendly tool for big data analytics.

Last month in New York we completed the 4^th and final event in the Big Analytics 2012 roadshow. This series of events shared ideas on practical ways to address the big data challenge in organizations and change the conversation from “technology” to “business value”. In New York alone, 500 people attended from across both business and IT and we closed out the event with two speaker panels. The data science panel was, in my opinion, one of the most engaging and interesting panels I’ve ever seen at an event like this. The topic was on whether organizations really need a data scientist (and what’s different about the skill set from other analytic professionals). Mike Gualtieri from Forrester Research did a great job leading & prodding the discussion.

Overall, these events were a great way to learn and network. The events had great speakers from cutting-edge companies, universities, and industry thought-leaders including LinkedIn, DJ Patil, Barnes & Noble, Razorfish, Gilt Groupe, eBay, Mike Gualtieri from Forrester Research, Wayne Eckerson, and Mohan Sawhney from Kellogg School of Management.

As an aside, I’ve long observed that there has been a historic disconnect between marketing groups and the IT organizations and data warehouses that they support. I noticed this first when I worked at Business Objects where very few reporting applications ever included Web clickstream data. The marketing department always used a separate tool or application like Web Side Story (now part of Adobe) to handle this. There is a bridge being built to connect these worlds – both in terms of technology which can handle web clickstream and other customer interactional data, but also new analytic techniques which make it easier for marketing/business analysts to understand their customers more intimately and better serve them a relevant experience.

We ran a survey at the events, and I wanted to share some top takeaways. The events were split into business and technical tracks with themes of “data science” and “digital marketing”. Thus, the survey data compares the responses from those who were more interested in technology than the business content, so we can compare their responses. The survey data includes responses from 507 people in San Francisco, 322 in Boston, 441 in Chicago, and 894 in New York City for a total of 2164 respondents.

You can get the full set of graphs here, but here are a couple of my own observations / conclusions in looking at the data:

1)      “Who is talking about big data analytics in your organization?” – IT and Marketing were by far the largest responses with nearly 60% of IT organizations and 43% of marketing departments talking about it. New York had slightly higher # of CIO’s and CEO’s talking about big data at 23 and 21%, respectively

2)      “Where is big data analytics in your company” – Across all cities, “customer interactions in Web/social/mobile” was 62% – the biggest area of big data analytics. With all the hype around machine/sensor data, it was surprisingly only being discussed in 20% of organizations. Since web servers and mobile devices are machines, it would have been interesting to see how the “machine generated data” responses would have been if we had taken the more specific example of customer interactions away

3)      This chart is a more detailed breakdown of the areas where big data analytics is found, broken down by city. NYC has a few more “other.” Some of the “other” answers in NYC included:

1. Claims
2. Client Data Cloud
3. Development, and Data Center Systems
4. Customer Solutions
5. Data Protection
6. Education
7. Financial Transaction
8. Healthcare data
9. Investment Research
10. Market Data
11.  Predictive Analytics (sales and servicing)
12. Research
13. Risk management /analytics
14. Security

4)      “What are the Greatest Big Analytics Application Opportunities for Businesses Today? – on average, general “data discovery or data science” was highest at 72%, with “digital marketing optimization” as second with just under 60% of respondents. In New York, “fraud detection and prevention” at 39% was slightly higher than in other cities, perhaps tied to the # of financial institutions in attendance

In summary, there are lots of applications for big data analytics, but having a discovery platform which supports iterative exploration of ALL types of data and can support both business/marketing analysts as well as savvy data scientists is important. The divide between business groups like marketing and IT are closing. Marketers are more technically savvy and the most demanding for analytic solutions which can harness the deluge of customer interaction data. They need to partner closely with IT to architect the right solutions which tackle “big analytics” and provide the right toolsets to give the self-service access to this information without always requiring developer or IT support.

We are planning to sponsor the Big Analytics roadshow again in 2013 and take it international, as well. If you attended the event and have feedback or requests for topics, please let us know. I hear that there will be a “call for papers” going out soon. You can view the speaker bios & presentations from the Big Analytics 2012 events for ideas.

Who do you believe in more – Santa Claus or Data Scientists? That’s the debate we’re having in New York City on Dec 12^th at Big Analytics 2012. Due to the sold-out event this panel discussion will be simulcast live to dig a little deeper behind the hype.

Some believe that data scientists are a new breed of analytic professional that mergers mathematics, statistics, programming, visualization, and systems operations (and perhaps a little quantum mechanics and string theory for good measure) all in one. Others say that Data Scientists are simply data analysts who live in California.

Whatever you believe, the skills gap for “data scientists” and analytic professionals is real and not expected to close until 2018. Businesses see the light in terms of data-driven competitive advantage, but are they willing to fork out $300,000/yr for a person that can do data science magic? That’s what CIO Journal is reporting with the guidance that “CIOs need to make sure that they are hiring for these positions to solve legitimate business problems, and not just because everyone else is doing it too”.

Universities like Northwestern University have built programs and degrees in analytics to help close the gap. Technology vendors are bridging the gap to make new analytic techniques on big data tenable to a broader set of analysts in mainstream organizations. But is data science really new? What are businesses doing to unlock and monetize new insights? What skills do you need to be a “data scientist”? How can you close the gap? What should you be paying attention to?

Mike Gualtieri from Forrester Research will be moderating a panel to answer these questions and more with:

• Geoff Guerdat, Director of Data Architecture, Gilt Groupe
• Bill Franks, Chief Analytics Officer, Teradata
• Bernard Blais, SAS
• Jim Walker, Director of Product Marketing, Hortonworks

Join the discussion at 3:30 EST on Dec 12^th where you can ask questions and follow the discussion thread on Twitter with #BARS12, or follow along on TweetChat at: http://tweetchat.com/room/BARS12

… it certainly beats sitting up all night with milk and cookies looking out for Santa!

Yesterday I presented at the Los Angeles Teradata User Group on the topic of “Data Science: Finding Patterns in Your Data More Quickly & Easily with MapReduce”. One point discussed was the common misnomer that big data is about volume, which is certainly part of the issue organizations are facing. However, the big story in big data is the complexity and additional processing required to make “unstructured” data actionable through analytics. This is where procedural frameworks like MapReduce can help. Here is a great post by Teradata’s own Bill Franks about unstructured data which helps describe the requirements unstructured data demands in the context of analytics.

As Franks notes, “the thought of using unstructured data really shouldn’t intimidate people as much as it often does.” Read more to learn why.