… and points beyond

There’s a point where query response time is low enough that it changes the analysis game completely. This is the amount of time that a decision maker is willing to wait to get the next answer. Not the first answer, but the next one, and the next one. Eventually the frustration of waiting is worse [...]

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Over the weekend I have revisited Tableau, enjoyed some success with MonetDB, tried to turn MySQL into a hundred million row data warehouse, been underwhelmed with Firebird, installed Greenplum and spent many frustrated hours with Talend Open Studio, Pentaho Kettle and Jitterbit.
Of course, I could just buy QlikView, but what can be done for less [...]

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I just can’t get enough of the Gapminder software, officially called Trendalyzer. The easy interface is just an enhanced scatter plot but it does the job perfectly. I think a lot of people, like me, were amazed and excited by his talk at TED 2006. He demonstrated that analytics offers real insight and improves efficiency. [...]

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Enrico Bertini at Visuale asks how important is interactivity in information visualization? As a proponent of QlikView, Spotfire, Tableau and others, I think it’s extremely important. Interactivity is the future, it’s “make or break.”
I’ve been implementing speed-of-thought interactive BI tools for 6 years and I don’t want to do it any other way. When I [...]

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I finally got around to watching the Tableau 3.0 webinar. I agree with their very excited presenter that Tableau 3.0 is a leap forward. The support of ad-hoc grouping of dimension elements is excellent as is the enhanced support of ad-hoc sets. The annotations look good and act sensibly. Generally, the new features are focused [...]

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My favorite part of the Juice Analytics presentation (PDF) is the rundown of the essential BI toolset and the examples they chose such as Yahoo Pipes, Baby Name Voyager and We Feel Fine. Great job!

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Jeff Han is going to change the world. His multi-touch interface is at the right place and the right time. Best video of it that I’ve seen.

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Social Explorer

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GCensus: Using Google Earth for Census Analysis

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