20110630

3-in-1: PCM, SQL-MapReduce patent, DV is new BI

In last few days something (3 news covered here in one post below) important for the future of Data Visualization and Big Data Analytics happened. IBM recently had 100th Birthday and almost at the same time their engineers published new invention, based on PCM (Phase-Change Memory).

  • PCM will not lose data when when power is turned off.

  • PCM 100 times faster (10 microseconds latency!) then flash and HDD.

  • PCM can endure at least 10 million write cycles (Flash maxed-out @30000)

  • PCM is cheap, has huge capacity and will be mass-produced before 2016.

  • PCM can be used everywhere from huge servers to smartphones



This invention is changing the approach to how to store and access "Big Data" and what portion of "Big Data" need to be in-memory (RAM) for Data Visualization purposes as oppose to outside of RAM (say on hard disk, flash or PCM). IBM may have a keys to Big Data kingdom...

To some people it may be unrelated, but not to me: Teradata just got the Patent on SQL-MapReduce technology they got from Aster Data acquisition. This technology allows also to integrate with Apache Hadoop and derived database systems, used in many Big Data applications.

And last but not least is a recent acknowledgment (for some reason it came from India's branch of IBM Software and I am wondering why, but finally it came "Straight from the horse's mouth"! ) from IBM that Data Visualization is the future of Business Intelligence (I said THIS many years ago and still repeating it from time to time: DV is new BI or in other words: the BI is dead, all hails to DV!). IBM is very proudly saying that Cognos 10 supports "enormous" number of Charts (I guess it will make Qlikview, Spotfire and Tableau people laughing)

and that the most discussed feature in Cognos 10 is Active Reports. This functionality allows the report authors to create interactive reports (apparently it is a big deal for IBM!).

IBM even is spreading rumors for weeks (through people who signed NDA with them) about Cognos TM1-based "new visualization tool", which will "disrupt" DV market... I guess because IBM knows that BI is dead (and IBM wasted $14+B buying 24 BI companies lately) and DV is new BI.

Since IBM improved PCM (see above) and had 100th birthday, I really wish good luck to them, but I wish IBM to stay focused on what they good at instead of spreading all over the high-tech. All these 3 "news" were published yesterday and today and somehow connected in my mind to Data Visualization's future and forced me to publish this "eclectic" post...

1 comment:

  1. [...] sounds good and smells like money, especially today. I already mentioned that they received U.S. Patent #7966340 on June 21, 2011. The patent is about SQL-MapReduce [...]

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