Don’t believe all the Big Data hearsay

As a Business Intelligence consultancy we read a lot of blogs, articles and information about modern day BI and data warehousing technologies. Often in comments and sometimes even in the articles themselves, you see people advocating no even bothering with a database and should just use “Big Data” technologies to provide business reporting and analytics.

Ignore these people, whilst NOSQL technologies are certainly improving, you cannot escape the unstructured-ness of the data you are querying and more importantly in the era of Google, end users expect responses to their queries within seconds, or even sub second in some cases, whilst the Analytics over NOSQL data sources look cool, they are slow. Most Analytics tools provide a caching layer between data source and user, and this can make the response time look a lot quicker than it really is. They cannot yet provide the speed that a tuned Analytical database like EXASol can provide for example, because they are designed to run over large amounts of unstructured data.

This isn’t to say that wont happen in the near future, with new layers running on top of Hadoop for example, Shark, Spark, Phoenix and Drill all provide very capable interfaces to your big data platform, the last two even providing on demand SQL. But you wont see them winning the TPC-H benchmarks for analytical processing anytime soon.

To provide the best experience to end users combine NOSQL technologies, with an Analytical Database and a great dashboarding applicaion like Yellowfin BI and you have a winning combination.

For more information or help with your Analytics get in touch