MicroStrategy World 2012 – Illuminating This Year’s Top BI Trends

Fred GallagherPosted on by

Starting Monday I am at MicroStrategy World in Miami. It will be great to get a chance to connect with attendees on hot topics like mobile business intelligence, cloud, and Big Data, one of the major trends of 2012.

MicroStrategy is the gold standard of business intelligence software, and its annual conference is an important event in the BI world – it highlights the most pressing issues and gives attendees the power to stay in front of the latest industry trends and technologies. There are more great sessions than I can possibly attend, but a few that I’ll be sure [...] Continue Reading…

An Even Faster Vectorwise

Fred GallagherPosted on by

Vectorwise 2.0 is available for download! Vectorwise’s record-breaking performance is now faster, easier to use, and includes richer Analytical capabilities.

Even faster: Load data and run queries faster than ever before. New fast load utility vwload helps make loading data faster and easier with direct loads into Vectorwise tables. Vectorwise’s record breaking performance is now faster and more efficient with new Partitioned Aggregate Functions that allow users to run multiple aggregations on subsets of data in a single query.

More Analytical & Data Features: Additional analytical functions make percentile and ranking queries faster and easier. New data and time features make [...] Continue Reading…

Mommy McGrattan Needs an Action App

Emma McGrattanPosted on by

A few years ago I was bestowed the nickname “The Chandler Bing of Ingres”, named for a character in the TV show “Friends” who had a job that was related to data but that none of his friends understood.    I’ve spent countless drunken nights trying to explain the joys of database internals to my friends, but they never seem to get excited about it!  It got to the point where I started lying to strangers on airplanes about what I did  – I’ve been everything from a hand-model to a mortician.   That all changed with the advent of Action [...] Continue Reading…

Visualizing Big Data

Fred GallagherPosted on by

As Big Data becomes a reality for more and more organizations and as the variety of data that they need to work with becomes more complex, it is increasingly hard for end-users to keep pace using traditional reporting and query tools. The explosion in volume and complexity of data had led to new techniques being applied to how data is presented and explored and one of the key techniques is data visualization.

 Leveraging presentation techniques and exploration methods originally developed for scientific and engineering visualization, companies like Tableau Software have now made visualization accessible, understandable and affordable for companies of [...] Continue Reading…

Fast and Easy BI

Fred GallagherPosted on by

As part of our research into Actian Action Apps, we’ve spent a lot of time talking with BI users and industry analysts to understand their views on what’s wrong with BI and, specifically, what are the obstacles to wider adoption of BI by business users. We’ve consistently heard the same things over and over:

 

BI takes too long to deploy – from identifying a business need through justifying, acquiring, installing, designing, developing, testing and finally deploying a BI project is quite simply too long for most business users
BI is too slow – the average response time on the average BI [...] Continue Reading…