Data Science or Data Alchemy

  I love the tweetness of the @howarddresner posts restated here regarding data science… and the dialog it has started… and I would like to add a twist to the conversation.   First a story…   I once consulted for a company who was building a marketing service for their clients. They targeted customers with products provided…

Decision Support Redux

In the late 1980’s and the early 1990’s the term for software that business users executed to run reports, fire off canned queries, and/or to explore data ad hoc was called “decision support” software. Later, and still today, the term “business intelligence” came into use. I never understood the sense of the switch. The term…

OLAP is not advanced analytics

OLAP searches a set of pre-aggregated data… a cube. If the cube is large enough that you don’t bump into the edges you might think that your search is ad hoc… but that is an illusion. The set is prescribed not ad hoc. In the 1980’s we sent paper reports out… they were moved on…

A Big Data Sound Bite…

Here is a sound bite on Big Data I composed for another source… Big Data is relative. For some firms Big Data will be measured in petabytes and for other in hundreds of gigabytes. The point is that very detailed data provides the vital statistics that quantify the health of your business. To store and…