The latest buzzword or phrase in big data and business intelligence (BI) today is the “universal semantic layer.” So what exactly is a universal semantic layer, or USL, and what problems does it solve? To borrow another vendor’s perspective shared in an announcement about its universal semantic layer technology, Matt Baird put it simply: “Historically,…
Zoomdata recently published a blog post detailing their use of materialized views as a means to “turbo-charge BI.” In the blog, Ruhollah Farchtchi, CTO at Zoomdata, discusses how traditional BI tools and methodologies are failing to keep up with the needs of big data. He is right, but of course materialized views are nothing new….
Companies are modernizing their BI platform based on a massive shift in the big data analytics market which started with the Hadoop ecosystem and continues to evolve. This is not only a shift in technology in response to the scale and growth of data from digital transformation and IoT initiatives at companies, but a shift…
You look at maps all the time these days, especially as part of your Internet searches. Whether you seek directions to a new restaurant, current traffic to the airport, or home prices in your area, you get better context and much more complete answers to questions when maps are involved. If you don’t currently use…
Regardless of your opinion of the term artificial intelligence (AI), there’s no question machines are now able to take on a growing number of tasks that were once limited to humans. These days, AI is commonly discussed in the context of video games and self-driving cars, but it is increasingly becoming relevant in business intelligence…
When looking to expand your organisation’s analytics capabilities, the default decision around technology is often: “use more of the same.” However, organisations are finding that this doesn’t always work, especially when they pursue digital transformation strategies that entail new types and new sources of data. Enterprises are now going beyond the default decision to add…
This blog was co-written with Ronak Chokshi, MapR product marketing. It was originally posted to the MapR blog site on November 1, 2018. If you’re not familiar with the concept of data warehouse optimization (DWO), it’s a strategy for identifying the “right” workloads for your data warehouse. In other words, it’s making sure you’re not…
In theory, big data technologies like Hadoop should advance the value of business intelligence tools to new heights, but as anyone who has tried to integrate legacy BI tools with an unstructured data store can tell you, the pain of integration often isn’t worth the gain. Legacy BI tools were built long before data lakes…
Data warehouse versus data lake – when should you use which for analytical insights? Compared to the venerable data warehouse, data lakes are a relative upstart in the business intelligence world. While similar in concept to warehouses, data lakes are quite different in structure and use. The terminology conjures up the appropriate imagery: brick-and-mortar warehouses…
Of all the new terms big data has introduced to the language, few continue to cause as much confusion as “data lake.” What is it, and how does it fit into an organization’s data warehousing and analytics strategy? The term “data lake” is actually a playful variation on data warehouse, a concept that goes back…
Big data should have been the rocket fuel that launched business intelligence (BI) into the stratosphere, so why are so many companies still stuck in neutral when it comes to harnessing the power of Apache Hadoop, or, more specifically, BI on Hadoop, for improved business insights? It’s because BI has failed to keep up with…
A lot has changed at Arcadia Data since 2012, when we were just four founders thinking about ways to connect non-technical business users to big data. What hasn’t changed is the problem we ended up solving. In fact, continuing growth in data volume and complexity has exacerbated the obstacles we are helping our customers overcome. …
