Yesterday I attended a session in Palo Alto on the subject of Data Refinery
and the speaker was Will Gorman of Pentaho. I did not realize that Pentaho
was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems couple of months ago. The terms “data
lake” was coined by James Dixon of Pentaho. I wrote a blog on this subject
last year. As soon as the term started to appear in the data lexicon, other
interesting terms such as “data swamp” appeared.
The term data lake has been coined to convey the concept of a centralized
repository containing virtually inexhaustible amounts of raw (or minimally
curated) data that is readily made available anytime to anyone authorized to
perform analytical activities. The often unstated premise of a data lake is
that it relieves users from dealing with data acquisition and maintenance
issues, and guarantees fast access to local, accurate and updated data
with... (more)
Big Data Coverage at CES 2015
I saw more discussion on big data at CES 2015 this week, compared to previous
years. Everyone talked about data as the central core of everything. The IoT
(Internet of Things), NFC (near Field Communication) and M2M (Machine to
Machine) communication are enabling pieces for many industries - security
monitoring, asset and inventory tracking, healthcare, process control,
building environment monitoring, vehicle tracking and telemetry, in-store
customer engagement and digital signage. Big data is the big deal here.
The Big Data ecosystem includes - cl... (more)
Eric Brewer, professor at UC Berkeley came up with the CAP theorem.
CAP stands for Consistency, Availability, and Partitioning or
Distributability.
He says out of the 3, the maximum you can achieve is 2.
For example, if you’re Amazon and you want various servers distributed all
over the world for better availability, then you must forfeit consistency. If
you buy a book in New York while I buy one in Singapore from two different
servers, then these two databases are out of sync and not consistent. Eric
calls this “eventually consistent”, as they will be synchronized later.
Another... (more)
With the noise of cloud computing rising by the day, there are basic
operational issues one should not forget – cloud or no cloud. One such
issue is the discipline of ILM (Information Life-cycle Management). How do
you manage data over its lifetime of many years and decades? Do you keep all
data current which drastically impacts the performance of applications using
them? As everyone knows the appetite for data is growing by leaps and bounds.
Not far from now, “personal petabyte” is quite viable given the need to
store audio and video stuff. A petabyte is one thousand terabytes w... (more)
On Wednesday, August 24, 2011, Steve Jobs resigned from Apple as its CEO. He
will stay as chairman of the board, handing over the CEO mantle to Tim Cook.
Even though this was sort of expected ever since Steve went on his medical
leave early this year, the news of his resignation came as a shock – that
it finally happened.
Much has been written since last 24 hours on his legacy and brilliance in the
tech industry, his obsession with elegant design and simplification for
users. He was way ahead of everyone else in this industry by not a year or
two, maybe ten years. I love this po... (more)
Jnan Dash is Senior Advisor at EZShield Inc., Advisor at ScaleDB and Board Member at Compassites Software Solutions. He has lived in Silicon Valley since 1979. Formerly he was the Chief Strategy Officer (Consulting) at Curl Inc., before which he spent ten years at Oracle Corporation and was the Group Vice President, Systems Architecture and Technology till 2002. He was responsible for setting Oracle's core database and application server product directions and interacted with customers worldwide in translating future needs to product plans. Before that he spent 16 years at IBM. He blogs at 
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