… and points beyond

Peter Batty discusses one-second results in the world of geospatial data.

The first was that if you can provide information at “the speed of thought”, or the speed of a click, this enables people to do interesting things, and work in a different and much more productive way. Google Search is an example - you can ask a question, and you get an answer immediately. The answer may or may not be what you were looking for, but if it isn’t you can ask a different question. And if you do get a useful answer, it may trigger you to ask additional questions to gain further insight on the question you are investigating.

A second idea is that when you are looking for insights from business data, the most valuable data is “on the edges” - one or two standard deviations away from the mean. This leads to another Netezza philosophy which is that you should have all of your data available and online, all of the time. This is in contrast to the approach which is often taken when you have very large data volumes, where you may work on aggregated data, and/or not keep a lot of historical data, to keep performance at reasonable levels (historical data may be archived offline). In this case of course you may lose the details of the most interesting / valuable data.