We often work with clients to benchmark database performance during the vendor selection process and as a result have become experts at working with the various standardized testing data sets available to the public. Almost anyone who has been involved in a performance test is familiar with the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) test.

Now and then new technologies, ideas, and even buzzwords come along that fundamentally change the way people look at the IT game. When Amazon first released Amazon Web Services (AWS) it changed the game of cloud-based data centers by introducing pay-as-you-go pricing for servers and storage. By replacing large up-front capital infrastructure expenditures with much lower costs that people could scale as their businesses grew, Amazon grew their own business by fostering many more entrants into the e-commerce space that in many cases also turned to Amazon logistics and fulfillment services. That was a game changing moment that was definitely a win-win for all parties.

This blog entry was published on TIBCO Spotfire’s Business Intelligence blog, by Linda Rosencrance, of the Spotfire Blogging Team. Here are 13 of her favorite data quotes – gathered from a number of sources on the web – from CEOs, statisticians, authors and even Sherlock Holmes.

I thought it was really cool!

So, would you ever even consider putting a data warehouse in the cloud?

With the cloud’s huge capacity, quick deployments and high availability—all at really low costs—it’s hard to ignore the possibilities. Ever since the iOLAP management team told me we were new integration partners with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Redshift platform, I have been thinking about the cloud-based data warehouse concept.

Companies are being pressured on multiple fronts to do something amazing with Big Data. But should the brakes be applied, even slightly, to consider some lessons from the past? Historically, large data warehouse projects failed at surprisingly high rates. How do we learn from these collective past mistakes and increase the odds that Big Data efforts will provide Big Returns?

From a May 23, 2013 article in the NY Times Technology Section.

“In the 1960s, mainframe computers posed a significant technological challenge to common notions of privacy. That’s when the federal government started putting tax returns into those giant machines, and consumer credit bureaus began building databases containing the personal financial information of millions of Americans. Many people feared that the new computerized databanks would be put in the service of an intrusive corporate or government Big Brother.”

In the May 21, 2013 issue of BI This Week, TDWI Author Steve Swoyer wrote an interesting article that represented some insights into both practitioner and vendor thinking when it comes to the pragmatics of Big Data, Hadoop and Relational Databases.

It’s kind of strange blowing your own horn, but I’m so excited to be at iOLAP that I just can’t help myself.

Steven Swoyer, an insightful TDWI author, recently posted in BI This Week that Analytics just isn’t what it used to be. As some business intelligence (BI) and decision-support veterans see it, the term itself has lost some of its meaning. Just how much is a subject of some debate.

Gartner, Inc. has identified the top technology trends that will play key roles in modernizing information management (IM) in 2013 and beyond, making the role of information governance increasingly important.