In this end-of-the-year edition of the Talking Data podcast, Senior Executive Editor Ed Scannell joined me to speak with Mike Matchett, founder and principal analyst of the Small World Big Data consultancy, as we rambled through some of the signal events of big data in 2018. Mergers and acquisitions, naturally, tend to be the stepping stones when you look back at the path just traveled. Cloudera and Hortonworks, IBM and Red Hat – these deals set the tone for our end-of-year big data...

As some TechTarget reporters were finishing their last podcasts for the year, we sat down briefly and tried to view the longer picture, to look through the glass darkly toward the past. Now, you are taught not to dwell on history from your first days in this field called journalism; people can buy books if that is what they want. But a calendar with days rapidly dwindling might lead you to do just that, and best editorial practices be dammed. And the tentative conclusion on some of our parts...

New apps for cloud have found a home on Azure’s cloud database. What about existing apps? On closer inspection it appears that there is work ahead. At PASS 2018, Craig Stedman encountered signs of progress therein. Kicking off the event was Microsoft’s database group leader Roland Kumar who, Stedman reports, discussed managed instances of SQL Server on the cloud that more functionally equivalate with downhome SQL Server on premises. In any case, the pace is quick. Check out the latest Talking...

This podcast considers how likely it is for existing users of Oracle and Microsoft to move to the cloud, as well as what obstacles they may face if they make the leap. Senior Executive Editor Craig Stedman tells us that’s still a work somewhat in progress. And, I get a chance to provide a take on Oracle’s comparable moves, hearkening again to my days at Oracle Open World in October.  Download the podcast and learn as we compare notes from our recent travels. Be there when “worlds collide.” –...

Last month we ventured West to cover Oracle Open World in San Francisco. Now, in a Talking Data Podcast edition recorded live on tape from San Francisco’s Moscone Center, intrepid reporters Jack Vaughan and David Essex discuss what they saw. Some of it was familiar – as always, Oracle’s Larry Ellison delivered a notable keynote. Some of it was new – Ellison’s discussion was much about cyber trust, impenetrable barriers and the gremlins lurking in the cloud. The post Larry Ellison’s...

Remember when the Web first caught on? One thing I remember is people saying “yeah, it is pretty cool, but, you know, it is stateless.” As most of what I heard on this issue was from enterprise software vendors, with all the bias that could entail, I should have taken what I was told with a grain of salt. The first big problem these folks saw with the Web was its statelessness, which made it far different from the synchronously connect clients and servers (at that time, Java servers) they...

In this episode of the Talking Data Podcast we are joined by Nicole Laskowski, senior news writer for SearchCIO.com. She tells us about a podcast series she and her colleagues have created known as Schooled in AI. This series looks at cutting-edge AI research being done at Carnegie Mellon University in order to give IT leaders in businesses a clear view on where things are headed. This discussion is preceded by Laskowki’s comments on a recent O’Reilly survey that appears to show – in what may...

For this episode of the Talking Data podcast, Mark Labbe takes a look at the MIT Startup Exchange. This program gives members of the MIT community a chance to show their wares, and as you may have guessed, those wares these days have a lot to do with AI and machine learning. Among the underlying trends, Labbe tells us, are natural language processing and geo-location. Labbe came across the MIT startup activity as part of his coverage of the recent Forrester AI Forum in Boston. Also...

At times the era of big data has taken on the flavor of the old West – the kind depicted in a movie like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. While it was seldom an outright confrontation, there’s little question that conscientious data stewards were usurped in some organization by developers who slightly resembled freewheeling bandits such as those you didn’t “need no badges” as they went about their business in John Houston’s film. We are a few years into this, and now there are signs that a...

Real estate listing firm Trulia is on the cutting edge of applying computer vision. In this edition of the Talking Data podcast, we talk with the company’s vice president of engineering, Deep Varma, to learn more about how his team is applying computer vision. As you’d expect, Trulia’s computer vision processes are built around deep learning algorithms. These are the machine learning models powering most of today’s most advanced AI applications. And while engineers have made significant...

The trend that sees the SQL query engine appearing on Hadoop, is just the start of a movement; the SQL query engine running on data other than HDFS may follow. If these trends portend fitful change for users, they also affect vendors. One vendor’s journey here is particularly telling. Starburst Data might be called a ‘re-start-up.’ The company was the brainchild of some young data technicians that included Daniel Abadi, an academic researcher who helped forward the notion of column-store...

It’s been said Oracle leader Larry Ellison advises his troops to focus on one competitor at a time, and in recent years that has been Amazon. What started out as an online book store eventually morphed into a general mega-store, and then, surprisingly, a mega-IT-outsourcer. In many ways it created the cloud computing formula. Like other leading lights of enterprise computing, Oracle is in the midst of efforts to shift focus from customers’ on-premises data centers to its own cloud computing...

Recent convocations of the Strata big data conference have seen a move away from sessions focused on data infrastructure and Hadoop and toward analytical applications and data science tools. Where is Strata going? Strata, it seems, cannot contain itself, when it comes to software containers. News around Kubernetes and containers figured prominently in coverage at the recent Strata Data Conference in San Jose, Calif. Containerized apps have significant benefits – so big data developers are...

C-suite folks and others have taken notice this week as Facebook finds itself in a sack of woe. Data privacy is at issue. The Silicon Valley high flyer has gained the kind of publicity you don’t want, in the wake of news that its social media platform was used to gather up Facebook profile information of thousands (or millions — the full details of the story are still coming in) of users for political consultancy Cambridge Analytica for still to be determined purposes. Cambridge Analytica did...

We’ve all heard the scare stories about AI eliminating jobs, but we’ve also heard the Pollyanna voices saying everything will be fine on the jobs front. The reality may be somewhere in the middle, according to Goldman Sachs analyst Heath Terry. In a presentation at the AI World Conference & Expo in Boston, held in December, Terry talked about how the risk of people losing their jobs to AI in the short term is very real. Jobs may recover long-term, but people should expect some disruption...

The scale of HDFS continues to soar upward. For large social media and cloud providers, the size of Hadoop clusters is such that it is hard to test out this basic component of classic Hadoop at scale before roll outs. That is another one of those niggling issues that slows Hadoop adoption. At LinkedIn, the challenges of successfully making even small configuration changes across broad arrays of HDFS led a team to create Dynamometer. This load and stress test suite uses actual NameNodes,...

The inaugural edition of the Talking Data podcast for 2018 features James Kobielus, analyst, Wikibon, who helps us take the racing pulse of data today. AI, machine learning, deep learning and analytics all come in for consideration. Buckle your seat belt, listen to the podcast and get ready for another tumultuous ride down the big data slope. – Jack Vaughan The post James Kobielus outlines the AI path for big data analytics appeared first on Talking Data Podcast » Episodes. The post James...

Machine learning was the big story of 2017, and we here at SearchBusinessAnalytics spent a lot of time talking with businesses who use the technology. In this edition of the Talking Data podcast, we recap some of the best interviews we did on the topic. The interviews look at everything from the role of engineers to avoiding black box functionality in models. Talking with people who actually use a given technology is generally one of the best ways to learn about its real importance, and we...

As 2017 winds down, we invite you to take a look behind the big data curtain. There, you will find data engineers, data scientists, end-users and others working to move a big data concept into production. It doesn’t take much digging to find that more self-service capabilities are needed at each stage in the data life cycle. That is among the take-aways from this latest edition of the Talking Data Podcast. In this and a subsequent episode, Ed Burns and I discuss recent user stories that...

Tableau currently has a comfortable relationship with a number of data preparation vendors, most notably Alteryx. But that hasn’t stopped the popular data visualization vendor from developing its own self-service data preparation tool, known as Project Maestro, set to be released before the end of the year. So what does that mean for Tableau’s data prep partnerships? We explore that question in this edition of the Talking Data podcast. We look behind the news to think about how it could...

You push the little valve down, and the music goes round and round. Where does it come out? What does that have to do with PowerBI? Say all you want about deep learning, machine learning and neural networks – eventually enterprises are going to generate reports and dashboards for analytics. In the end, that is where “the music” comes out. For Microsoft that dashboard and reporter often take the form of PowerBI. This analytics visualizer is an important part of the company’s analytics effort,...

Cloud, automation and security were primary among a slew of topics at Oracle OpenWorld 2017. In this podcast, recorded at the event, David Essex, Brian McKenna and I share impressions on the company, and react to Oracle leader Larry Ellison’s various comments on databases, machine learning and data breaches. In the cloud, Oracle may still be playing catch-up, but it also seems to be exhibiting considerable momentum, according to the Talking Data podcasters. The post Oracle Open World 2017 in...

We closed out September with a nod to our recent Talking Data Podcast. It is a look at digital disruption, Hadoop, and S3. The stuff that dreams are made of, as Ed Burns and I encountered them at the Big Data Innovation Conference. Be our guest – take a gander!  -Jack Vaughan The post Big data Hadoop, machine learning and quantum computing appeared first on Talking Data Podcast » Episodes. The post Big data Hadoop, machine learning and quantum computing appeared first on Talking Data Podcast...

Data science is nothing new, but despite the fact that it’s been around for years, businesses are still looking for ways to get value from it. There’s an inherent tension between the research mindset required to perform good data science and the results-based focus of business processes. But by bending towards each other both areas can benefit. In this edition of the Talking Data podcast, we recap some perspectives on how businesses can derive value from data science as presented at the Big...

The data side of Microsoft will be front and center at the upcoming Ignite conference, scheduled for Sept. 24 through 29 in Orlando, Fla. Sessions at the event will flesh out important details concerning SQL Server 2017 for Linux, Azure SQL Data Warehouse and the company’s most recent NoSQL database entry — Azure Cosmos DB. The Redmond giant has increasingly used SQL Server as a launching pad for analytics efforts that have come to rival those of database; one such effort is new Python...