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Alpine Data and Goliath

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Vision and bravado came from the Alpine Data Labs CEO and a spokesman for the venture fund at the recent Alpine Data Labs reception. But the stack of books near the exit told the real story: Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, David and Goliath, tells how Alpine intends to take on the “giants.”

CMO “and data geek” Bruno Aziza, in his second month since SiSense, says that where the Goliaths demand coding, Alpine demands none. Where the Goliaths sit on the desktop, Alpine floats on clouds. While the Goliaths extract from Hadoop, Alpine rides on top. Go, Alpine.

Answering the real questions in data analysis

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A guy walks into your cube and asks you to whip up an econometric model. You’re a statistician, after all, and you’ve got a Ph.D. in something or other. You do this for lunch, he figures.

He “over-thought,” says the one whose cube such a guy walked into. Theresa Doyon has been routinely navigating datasets in the 50 to 300 million-unit range for 10 years. She’s good at all-terrain tools like SAS and KXEN. She could have produced the report he wanted. Instead, she asked him, “Why?”

They talked for an hour. What he actually needed, she discovered, was more of a descriptive report — something that gives a picture of a current situation.… Read the rest “Answering the real questions in data analysis”

Migrating mindsets is the real challenge in ETL

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I was intrigued by Donald Farmer’s recent tweet about ETL: “Migrating technologies is just work. Migrating people and mindsets is the real challenge.” I asked him to elaborate.

Donald is principal program manager of SQL Server Analysis Services at Microsoft. He sees “numerous” examples of migrating users who reject perfectly good methods in favor of “the Informatica way of doing it,” or the Datastage, or whatever they’re used to. Many IT workers see their career paths as not “DBA” but “Oracle DBA” or other brand, causing much extra expense in licensing and support. He writes in email, “CTOs have to battle that very hard.”… Read the rest “Migrating mindsets is the real challenge in ETL”