VisiCalc: 32nd anniversary of spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets (VisiCalc or "Visible Calculator" was released by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston in October 1979 - 32 years ago - originally for Apple II computer) were one of the very first Business Intelligence (BI) software (sold over 700,000 copies in six years).



It was released on October 19, 1979 - see the original Diary of Dan about it (also see notes of Peter Jennings here and here and especially detailed Bob Frankston's article here):



For historical purposes I have to mention that VisiCalc actually was not the first spreadsheet program invented (for example I am aware of multi-user spreadsheet software written before VisiCalc in USSR in PL/1 for mainframes with IBM's IMS Database as a backend ), but it is a first commercial spreadsheet introduced on American market and it was a turning point of PC industry.

The "Visible Calculator" went on sale in November of 1979 and was a big hit. It retailed for US$100 and sold so well that many dealers started bundling the Apple II with VisiCalc. The success of VisiCalc turned Apple into a successful company, selling tens of thousands of the pricey 32 KB Apple IIs (no matter how hard Bob Frankston tried, he could not fit VisiCalc in the 16 KB of RAM on the low-end Apple II. VisiCalc would only be available for the much more expensive 32 KB Apple II) to businesses that wanted them only for the spreadsheet. Version of VisiCalc for Atari was even retailed for $200!

VisiCalc was published without any Patent and it is a living prove that Patent System currently is useless for people, abused by large corporations for their own benefit, and it is actually a brake for innovations and it is not protecting inventors. Absence of patent protection for VisiCalc created the Spreadsheet Revolution and Innovations (SuperCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, QuattroPro, Excel, OpenOffice's Calc, Google's Spreadsheets and many others) and tremendously accelerated PC industry.

As Dan Bricklin said it by himself "We all borrowed from each other" and as George Bernard Shaw said: "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."



Application of Spreadsheets in the BI field began with the integration of OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) and Pivot tables. In 1991, Lotus (in addition to 1-2-3) released Improv with Pivoting functionality (also see Quantrix as a reborned [originally in 1994-95] Improv), followed by Microsoft’s release (in Excel 5) of PivotTable in 1993 (trademarked by Microsoft). 500+ millions people currently using Excel and at least 5% of them using it for BI and Data Visualization purposes. PowerPivot added to Excel 2010 speedy and powerful in-memory columnar database which enables millions of end-users to have a self-serviced BI.

Essbase was the first scalable OLAP software to handle large data sets that the early spreadsheet software was incapable of. This is where its name comes from: Extended Spread Sheet Database (Essbase owned by Oracle now).  Currently one of the best OLAP and BI software is SSAS (Analysis Services from Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and upcoming SQL Server 2012 with its new Tabular mode) and Excel 2010 with its PowerPivot, PivotTables and Pivot Charts is one of the most popular front-end for SSAS.

There is no doubt that Excel is the most commonly used software for "BI purposes". While Excel is general business software, its flexibility and ease of use makes it popular for data analysis with millions of users worldwide. Excel has an install base of hundreds of millions of desktops: far more than any other "BI platform". It has become a household name.With certain precaution it can be used for a good or at least prototyping Data Visualization (most of charts below created with Excel):



From educational utilization to domestic applications to prototyping (or approximated) Data Visualization and enterprise implementation, Excel has been proven incredibly indispensable. Most people with commercial or corporate backgrounds have developed a proficient Excel skillset. This makes Excel the ultimate self-service BI platform and spreadsheet technologies as a common ground for all viable Data Visualization technologies on market.

Qlikview 11 is anounced (almost 11/11/11)

Qlikview 11

is announced on 10/11/11 - one year after 10/10/10, the release date of Qlikview 10! Qliktech also lunched new demo site with 12 demos of Qlikview 11 Data Visualizations: http://demo11.qlikview.com/ . Real release happened (hopefully) before end of 2011, my personal preference for release date will be 11/11/11 but it may be too much to ask...

QlikView 11 introduces the comparative analysis by enabling the interactive comparison of user-defined groupings. Also now with comparative analysis business users have the power of creating any (own) data (sub)sets and decide which dimensions and values would define the data sets. Users can then view the data sets they have created side by side in a single chart or in different charts:

Collaborative Data Visualization and Discovery.

Also Qlikview 11 enables Collaborative Workspaces – QlikView users can invite others – even those who do not have a license – to participate in live, interactive, shared sessions. All participants in a collaborative session interact with the same analytic app and can see others’ interactions live, see



QlikView users can engage each other in discussions about QlikView content. A user can create notes associated with any QlikView object. Other users can then add their own commentary to create a threaded discussion. Users can capture snapshots of their selections and include them in the discussion so others can get back to the same place in the analysis when reviewing notes and comments. QlikView captures the state of the object (the user’s selections), as well as who made each note and comment and when. Qliktech's press release is here:

http://www.qlikview.com/us/company/press-room/press-releases/2011/en/1011-qliktech-introduces-social-business-discovery-in-launch-of-qlikview-11

“Our vision for QlikView 11 builds on the fact that decisions aren’t made in isolation, but through social exchanges driven by real-time debate, dialog, and shared insight,” says Anthony Deighton, CTO and senior Vice President, Products at QlikTech. “QlikView 11’s social business discovery approach allows workgroups and teams to collaborate and make decisions faster by collectively exploring data, anywhere, anytime, on any device. Business users are further empowered with new collaborative and mobile capabilities, and IT managers will appreciate the unified management functionality that allows them to keep control and governance at the core while pushing usage out to the edges of the organization.”

New Features in Qlikview 11

Qlikview now is integrated (I think it is a big deal) with TFS - source control system from Microsoft. This makes me think that may be Donald Farmer (he left Microsoft in January 2011 and joined Qliktech) has an additional assignment to make it possible for Microsoft to buy Qliktech? [Dear Donald - please be careful: Microsoft already ruined ProClarity and some others after buying them]. Free QlikView 11 Personal Edition will be available for free download by the end of year at www.qlikview.com/download.



Also if you will check Demo "What is new in Qlikview 11" here:
http://us.demo11.qlikview.com/QvAJAXZfc/opendoc.htm?document=Whats%20New%20in%20QlikView11.qvw&host=demo11&anonymous=true , you can find the following new features:

• mentioned above Comparative Analysis


• Collaborative Data Visualization


• integration with TFS


• granular chart dimension control.


• Conditional Enabling (dynamic add/remove) dimensions and/or expressions/metrics


• Grid Container to show multiple objects, including another containers


• Metadata for Charts: annotations, tips, labels/keywords, comments, mouse-over pop-up labels


• some new actions (including Clear Field)

Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine

Oracle's timing for "unveiling Exalytics In-Memory Machine" was unfortunate because it was in a shadow of Steve Jobs. In addition It was a lot of distraction between Larry Ellison's and Mark Benioff's egos.

Oracle is late to Analytics appliance game and have to fight already released products like Netezza/IBM (proven performer), SAP HANA (has large sales pipeline already), family of Teradata Appliances (Teradata Columnar coming in 2 months and sounds very good to me plus it packaged with Information Builders BI) , EMC/Greenplum Data Computing Appliance (doubled the sales during last year!), Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse Appliance (Based on CTP3 I expect the great things from SQL Server 2011/2012/Denali) etc. They all are in-memory Machine, capable to store and process big data (exabytes? I guess depends on price...), almost all of them already have or will have soon columnar database.

Larry Ellison claimed during Oracle Openworld this week that "Exalytics is 10x faster than…just about everything."



Yes, It runs a software stack that includes parallelized versions of Oracle’s TimesTen in-memory database and memory-optimized Essbase OLAP Server ("BI Foundation"), but it is not a columnar database, so I wonder how Oracle is going to prove Larry's bold claims. However, Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Exalytics supports columnar compression that reduces the memory footprint for in-memory data. Compression ratios of 5X are practical and help expand in-memory capacity (Qlikview, PowerPivot and Spotfire can do much better "columnar compression" then 5 times, claimed by Oracle)



Hardware itself looks impressive with four Intel Xeon© E7-4800 series processors (40 cores total) and 1TB of RAM but pricing is unclear. It has total 8 high speed ports:

• 2 quad-data rate (QDR) 40 GB/s InfiniBand ports. When connected to Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalytics becomes an integral part of the Oracle Exadata private InfiniBand network and has high-speed, low latency access to the database servers. When multiple Oracle Exalytics machines are clustered together, the InfiniBand fabric also serves as the high-speed cluster interconnect.


• Exalytics has Two 10 GB/s Ethernet ports for connecting to enterprise data sources


• Exalytics has Four 1 GB/s Ethernet ports are available for client access

Exalytics includes 3.6TBs of raw disk capacity. Optionally, clusters of Oracle Exalytics machines can leverage network attached storage.

Hardware portion of it probably below $100000 (I saw a guesstimate of $87000) but most expensive probably will be the Essbase (Business Intelligence Foundation Suite with in-memory Cubes now and ability to replicate entire data warehouse into TimesTen in-memory database) with list price about $450000, so we are talking  here about millions of dollars, which is (let's wait and see the final pricing) will definitely reduce the number of potential buyers, especially considering weak Data Visualization and average BI functionality of Oracle's software stack. According to Larry Ellison, Exalytics has 1TB of RAM but can hold five to 10TB of data in memory thanks to COLUMNAR compression.

Oracle Exalytics promotes self service analytics and makes it easier to develop analytics content by introducing a Presentation Suggestion Engine (PSE) which provides recommendations on type of visualizations to use to best represent a data set.



I do not expect anything spectacular from this "PSE". For example Oracle proudly introduced "new micro charts and multi-panel trellis charts to visualize dense multi-dimensional, multi-page data on a single screen. The multi-panel trellis charts are particularly effective at displaying multiple visualizations across a common axis scale for easy comparison, to see a trend and quickly gain insights":



but this micro charts available in much better shape and form for many years from Spotfire, Qlikview, Tableau etc. and relatively recently even from Excel.

In any case, Exalytics suppose to be well integrated with Oracle's Exadata database machine and Exalogic application server. Mr. Ellison did some other bold claims like:

• "For a given task, it will cost you less on an Exadata than it would on a plain old commodity server."


• "we move data around a hundred times faster than anyone else in this business"


• "1,000 Exadata machines have been installed and 3,000 more will be sold this year"


• "Java applications' response times are 10 times as fast on Exalogic, and companies can serve many more users at once"

Special Note about Java.

I am not sure why Java is advantage for Oracle. Java is not welcome at Apple (can you say Objective C?), at Microsoft (can you cay C# ?) and recently even at Google (after Oracle sued Google for “misuse” of Java, which reminded me the Sun, disappearing after it sued Microsoft for … “misuse” of  … Java). Together those 3 companies have almost all cash (almost $200B if you exclude Oracle as a Java Owner) software companies have worldwide (Apple has $76B+ in a bank, Microsoft has $60B+ and Google has about $40B – may be less after buying Motorola Mobility) and I am simply following the money here. If Oracle wishes to have the Java-based advanced Data Visualization, they are better buy Visokio and integrate their  Omniscope with Exalytics and Exalogic instead of the inventing the wheel with PSE.