Your Weekly BI News in a “New York Minute”

I’m a glutton for BI information to the point of addiction

Oct. 9, 2009 07:13 PM

I’m a glutton for BI information to the point of addiction. Aday rarely goes by without my “scanning” three hundred or so feeds, blogs, twits,websites and other news and information sources pertaining to businessintelligence. I did the same thing whenI was on the software development side, mind you, but using significantly less onlinesources and way more books. I find BI to be so dynamic an industry that by thetime most books are published, the information is already obsolete. And that’s just on the technical side. On the business front, things change andevolve even faster.

So I started looking around for an aggregated “digest” ofthe day’s salient BI news points. I was looking for something that spanned themultitude of industry areas in BI from engineering and product news (platformto front-end), to business development, partnerships, personnel (who quit,joined or got fired), distribution (SaaS and cloud issues), venture funding, importantconferences, and so on. In a nutshell,all the areas that affect our industry one way or another. To my surprise, I couldn’tfind anything readily available. Somethingsomeone could take on a train or pull down to a mobile device during a dailycommute to get a quick “scoop” on the week’s happenings in BI.

Then I figured, why not try my hand at compiling such a list ona weekly basis. I know this is fairlysubjective, but while scanning my own sources, I always “pull over” severalitems for more in-depth examination. I do this very quickly (I’m a very fastreader) and often “bucketize” these links using Delicious.com for furtherexamination and/or analysis. Clearlypeople have different areas of interest but I figured this pruned list couldbenefit some folks with no more than a “New York Minute” to spare.

I’m not sure how best to format and present this yet. I didn’twant to start off with some sort of mailing list offering because, quitehonestly, I’ve never stuck with a mailing list subscription more than a coupleof weeks myself. So for now I’m going totry and post this on my blog on a weekly basis every Friday. If I detect minimal interest, then I’ll try anotherapproach. I'll also include more items in future weeks. This is more of a "trial and error" endeavor at this point. Meanwhile, and without furtherado (or order), here’s my BI Digest for the week of October 5^th,2009 "in a New York Minute".

Discrete SaaS player 1010Data scores a big contract in the retails space by signing up Dollar General.
MicroStrategy is far from Open Source but giving away software for free nevertheless now. Trojan horse or good value?
Awesome webinar on what was learned in the past 20 years in BI compliments of Claudia Imhoff and WhereScape
"But can it core a apple"? On integrating OLTP and OLAP in the same database engine. One of the most commented (and educational, for me) Curt Monash posts I’ve seen.
First of a two-part in-depth series on MapReduce vs. relational databases.
You might not be paying your DBA enough money to put up with this (alternatively, you might be using the wrong DBMS platform ).
BI and DW “implementors“ take heed. You may need more duct tape after all (this doesn’t just apply to the software development community, believe me).
For a deep (and I mean deep) dive into what customer analytics in retail are all about.
A really novel (read: smart) way to engage your market without the BS, hassle and expenses of conventional physical conferences as described by Merv Adrian who tried it.
Dashboards in Excel 2010 (yawn). Sorry it’s been hard to get excited about MSFT BI in, oh say about 18 months now.
Can (or should) InfoBright actually kick MonetDB’s rear-end? The numbers are (almost) in.
In-memory databases and the Kognitio men who love them.
Well, looks like nobody is using EC2 after all (NOT!)
Larry invites Marc to Oracle Open World next week. See rumors fly...
At least one person is excited about Gemini (but it’s a monkey so..).
If you live and breathe “fabric” and grok fiber over Ethernet, this one’s for you.

And that's the way BI is. Goodnight, and enjoy your weekend!

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Published Oct. 9, 2009— Reads 2,965
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About Jerome Pineau
Twenty years of extensive hands-on software development, application engineering, customer interaction, management and consulting experience spanning a diverse array of industries and business models.

Now a "full-service" sales engineer, solutions architect, evangelist, technical ambassador (or whatever you want to call it) in the business intelligence space, specializing in high-performance analytical database management systems (ADBMS).

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