Bill McColl

For twenty years, analytics has been viewed as just one specific area within the broader relational database industry. So, analytics has meant databases. Today that view is changing. Over the past year or so, a new movement, the "NoSQL" movement has emerged promoting the advantages of doing a variety of kinds of analytics without using any relational database technologies at all. Whatever one thinks of the capabilities and limitations of distributed key-value stores relative to relational databases, one thing is clear - the stranglehold that SQL has held over all aspects of data analytics since 1990 is now coming to an end. Other non-SQL approaches to analytics such as MapReduce/Hadoop, a very simple dataflow architecture for batch computing, are now gaining ground. As th... (more)

The Intercloud: Turning Computing Inside Out

The intercloud turns computing inside out. With traditional IT, we move the data to where the computing infrastructure is located. With the data volumes in most application areas now growing exponentially, this IT model is now broken. Moving massive volumes of data around means more bandwidth, more storage, and more latency. We need instead to position the computing infrastructure next t... (more)

Cloud Analytics Checklist

Cloud Data Analytics on Ulitzer In the previous article we looked at how realtime cloud analytics looks set to disrupt the $25B SQL/OLAP sector of the IT industry. What are users looking for from a next-generation post-SQL/OLAP enterprise analytics solution? Let's look at the requirements: Realtime + Historical Data. In addition to analyzing (historical) data held in databases (Oracle, S... (more)

Welcome To The Realtime Intercloud

In the past it was so much easier. Search engines could crawl the web at a leisurely pace, clean up the data, build indexes, and every so often provide a new, improved search experience with more web pages covered. That was the internet, the old non-realtime internet. Today it’s different! Not only are people interested in a lot more than just web pages, they want to see everything LIVE,... (more)

Cloud Analytics

Cloud Data Analytics on Ulitzer Cloud analytics is hot. Gartner's top two strategic technologies for the enterprise in 2010 are cloud computing and advanced analytics. In their words "Technologies you can't afford to ignore". Venture capitalist Ann Winblad, in a recent video, points out that the coming era of realtime cloud analytics will have a revolutionary impact on the enterprise, cr... (more)