naked data

Traditional BI surfaces structured data. Unstructured data form the bulk of organisational knowledge, some estimate as high as 85%. Social software allows users to tag assumptions made in the decision-making process to the BI framework. Most leading development in social networking and services is in the consumer internet space. You probably can think of a few. Much of this is aligned to the open source philosophy because this is only way the development community can evolve quickly on such a scale.

For structured data, BI is all about engine performance, the database. The frontend graphs, scorecards, reports can seem the same to end users. Like cars, they all seem to have four wheels and four doors. But under the hood is as different as an F1 engine to one pulling a 10-tonne truck.

Thing is, users don’t care what the engine is, as long as is fast and stable. There are two types of engines – read only and read+write. For Performance Management you need read+write in a multidimensional database. In fact, we don’t know why you’d bother with a read only database: what you can do in a spreadsheet (read, write numbers & text, real time calculations) is your baseline.

Garter predicts 70% of Performance Management will use in-memory by 2012. The best in-memory BI tool is PALO. PALO is Commercial Open Source – which means you are not restricted in rolling out the benefits to all your users. PALO is faster, more flexible and more scalable than any other Performance Management OLAP db we’ve seen.

How does being Open Source help PALO maintain technical leadership?

“..instead of conventional processors (CPU), the scientific field has started utilizing GPUs to deal with complex computations. Modern graphics cards consist of many small processor cores which parallelize and consequently speed up computations.” Jedox News 2009