Author Archives: Todd Goldman
My Thoughts on Gartner’s Thoughts About the Challenges of Hadoop for Data Integration
Just read a great Gartner report titled “Hadoop is Not a Data Integration Solution” (January 29, 2013). However, I beg to differ slightly with Gartner on this one. The title should have been “Hadoop Alone is Not a Data Integration Solution.” The report outlines all of the reasons that just deploying Hadoop by itself is often quite challenging.
Issues that we at Informatica have personally seen our customers deal with include: (more…)
Revenge of the Metadata
Short commentary on the fact that in the end, John McAfee was not caught through superior sleuthing by the Guatemalan Police but by a hacker who took him down thanks to metadata.
So the rest of you don’t have to read the details, what happened was that McAfee, yes, that McAfee of antivirus software fame, fled his home in Belize after his next door neighbor had been found murdered. He fled Belize and had been hiding out, blogging and tweeting along the way which I am sure the authorities found quite amusing. In the end, he was caught because he gave an interview to a reporter who took a picture of him with his iPhone. The picture was posted on the Internet and some hacker got a hold of the photo file which had the GPS coordinates of the location of the phone embedded in it. (more…)
Are Data Nerds Destined to Rule the World?
Just finished reading the McKinsey quarterly on “Putting Big Data and Advanced Analytics to work.” It is an interesting article that hits on the need to have people who understand data and understand the business.
The short-term problem is that if you’ve developed a new model that predicts or optimizes, how do you get your frontline managers to use it? That’s always a combination of simple tools and training and things like that. Then there’s a medium-term challenge, which is “How do I upscale my company to be able to do this on a broader scale?” (more…)
Election Day and Data… Ignore the Data at Your Own Peril
While this blog may seem to stray into the political, it really is about how we all use and abuse data to support the outcomes we want, but not necessarily the outcomes the data supports.
For those of you who don’t spend too much time watching the Colbert Report, there is a war that seems to be going on between the TV and web-based political punditry and Nate Silver, every geek’s favorite prognosticator of elections. For those of you who don’t know, Nate Silver is a baseball statistician (think “Moneyball” which was not about Silver) who four years ago decided to apply statistical analysis to election polling. He started the first well known blog, www.fivethirtyeight.com , which he subsequently sold to the NY Times but still runs, that took the daily public state and national U.S. presidential polling numbers and created a forecast model based on all the data. He then used this model to correctly predict 49 of 50 states in the 2008 election and was subsequently very accurate for the Senate races in 2010. (more…)
The Report of My Death Was an Exaggeration
“The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
– Mark Twain
Ah yes, another conference another old technology is declared dead. Mainframe… dead. Any programming language other than Java…. dead. 8 track tapes …OK, well some things thankfully do die, along with the Ford Pinto that I used to listen to the Beatles Greatest Hits Red Album over and over again on that 8 track… ah yes the good old days, but I digress. (more…)
Big Data Edition is Here!
The PowerCenter Big Data Edition’s here! The PowerCenter Big Data Edition’s here!
Navin R Johnson
The Jerk
The Presidential Debate and Big Data
So I have to admit that the “Binders full of women” comment blew right past me when I was listening to Monday night’s debate as I was driving in my car on Highway 85 on my way home. However, by the time I got home, the Twitterverse was all lit up about that topic and I had to wonder about all of the information that Amazon must be processing to target people to buy the latest TrapperKeeper (or TrapHerKeepHer) binder for their tween children. (more…)
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