There is a lot of buzz around Big Data and the NOSQL movement these days and rightly so. The issues with data have essentially been two-fold: find cost effective ways to store ever increasing amounts of data and information, and find ways to mine this information to extract meaningful Business Intelligence. This problem has been compounded by the emergence of web 2.0 technologies whose legion of loyal fans ...

It’s ironic how all of a sudden Vertica is changing its focus from being a column-only database to claiming to be an Analytic Platform. If you’ve used an Analytic Platform you know it’s more than just bolting in a layer of analytic functions on top of a database. But that’s how Vertica claims it’s now a full-blown analytic platform when in fact their analytics capability is rather thin. For instance, their ...

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’ ...

In recent times a number of vendors have announced so called ‘hybrid storage models’ for analytic databases (e.g. Aster Data). A ‘hybrid storage model’ is one where an entire table or partitions within it can be stored either along rows or columns. An oft mentioned motivation for this is that different kinds of analytics require different storage models and so the user should be able to choose as needed. Be ...

Aster Data, a market leader in big data management and advanced analytics, today announced that it has closed a $30 million Series C round of financing led by both new and existing investors. The company will use the new funding to accelerate growth, scale operations, and expand its global market share in the $20 billion database market -- a market that is experiencing rapid growth as a result of both the e ...

Aster Data, a San Carlos, Calif.-based start-up developing software for big data application,s says it’s replacing its founder-CEO — Mayank Bawa — with Quentin Gallivan, formerly of PivotLink, a business intelligence software company. Gallivan was also the CEO of Postini, a mail management company that was acquired by Google in 2007. Bawa will switch roles to become the company’s chief customer officer. The ...

Analysis of online activity to make predictions about future behavior The task I was charged with at my most recent position was to build the backend database system and application to handle modeling processing on our VLD (Very Large Data sets). What the business needed was a way to analyze past online activity in the hopes of making predictions about future online shopping behavior (propensity modeling). ...