What’s so big about Big Data? It’s probably bigger than you think. For some time now, the specialty data warehouse (DW) has been a technology proposition in search of a market. DW appliance pioneer Netezza Inc. -- acquired by IBM Corp. in mid-2010 -- hemorrhaged cash for the first few years of its existence. (Netezza enjoyed its first yearly profit 18 months after its IPO.) Ditto for DATAllegro Corp., which ...

One of the coolest parts of my job is seeing how companies use analytics to drive their business. The term “big data” has become somewhat of a superstar in the world of analytics recently, but it’s also the complexity and richness of the insights from that data which make it a “big data” challenge for companies to tackle with traditional data management infrastructures. It’s not just size that matters – it’ ...

Millions of tweets run through Twitter. It's the poster child for big data on the Web. To get data out of Twitter and use it to track sentiment requires tools with considerable processing and computational capabilities. BigSheets is a tool created by IBM that takes terabytes or even petabytes of Web data and turns it into information that provides business intelligence. The tool can be used for structured o ...

Scale breaks everything. Scale even breaks your assumptions about how best to store and query data. Scale does not care about your personal engineering preferences, or about SQL vs. NoSQL. The demands of rapid growth and ever-higher expectations for availability, performance, and cost efficiency force you to re-evaluate and re-imagine what you need, what is possible, and how to best achieve your business go ...