Browsing Posts published in November, 2006
QlikView is an amazing product. I say this as an end user and implementor for the past 5 years.
- A versatile data warehouse with multi-billion-row capacity and incredible speed.
- A BI front end for report generation, interactive analysis, dashboard design.
- Complemented by a platform for distributing data securely to customers, suppliers, contractors, etc.
- End-user applications are intuitive and have a high wow-factor.
- An easy to use ETL tool for extracting data and building the data model. You can even have several models in the same application.
- It is not OLAP. It smokes OLAP in performance and development time.
- You can build a proof of concept in days and a final application in a few weeks. Seriously.
- The rapid, iterative development means precise results in less time and lower cost.
If you check it out after reading this post, I would really like to hear from you. Send a note to blog (at) datapacifica . com. In the interest of disclosure, I have consulted to several of QlikTech’s customers.
I saw this video last week and I have been wondering what makes it so powerful. Authenticity. Just the process, done as it has been done for a long time by the men in the video. No sound track. No deep sonorous voiceover. It is like a video of a hurricane–documenting what is independent of meaning and judgment.
So how does this relate? I have the same kind of reaction watching this video as when I watch Hans Rosling’s Gapminder presentation. I feel confronted and enlightened by facts presented intuitively and honestly: measurable actions, a trend over time, a demonstration of misconceptions, hidden insights.
Now I always think of Rosling’s work when deciding how to present the what-is-so reality for my client. And with videos like this one I think of how that same kind of authenticity (as delivered by anyone with a camcorder, video editing software and YouTube), can impact my society and the world. And if this video doesn’t strike you, there are others that have had a recent impact.
Data visualization tools such as Swarm are crucial to sifting through the hordes of detritus on Digg. Because of these tools, Digg was able to harness the collective intelligence of its users and serve up speedy results that, in this case, bested Google’s specialized algorithm.
Use the Google Maps interface with your own images through Maplib.net. Via O’Reilly Radar.
Flickr has assembled stats on the cameras used over time. Take a look at the stats page for Canon cameras. And some of the photos from the number one camera. Nice shot. Via Boing Boing.
Microsoft said it is designing a 270TB multinode data warehouse for a foreign government that it declined to identify. The software vendor is also working on a 162TB single-node installation for its own marketing department.
This recent Slashdot article resurrected ideas about the mind’s ability to detect change in familiar systems, even very complicated ones. Slashdot links to an IBM developerWorks article.
If you want to create a soundscape from a network, there is the Peep toolkit. In their examples the background network is a babbling brook and key actions are bird chirps. By tuning these effects for your network under normal conditions, you create a (hopefully pleasant) reference soundscape. An increase in owl-hooting may alert you to a spike in bad password attempts.
Press release from FortiusOne masquerading as an article on InformationWeek. Their product in action.
