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Roundup: A big month for big data

This October isn't just busy with Presidential politics; it’s high season for the Big Data news cycle as well.
Written by Andrew Brust, Contributor

This month has already been an important one for Big Data, and there’s more to come.  In the last two weeks, several industry announcements have emerged, which I’ll go through briefly here.  And with Strata + Hadoop World coming to New York next week, a host of other announcements will be made. October, 2012 may be the biggest month for Big Data thus far.

Here’s what’s happened so far this month:

  • On Monday, October 1st, Opera Solutions announced the integration of its own Signal Hub Suite with Oracle Big Data Appliance and Oracle Exalytics.  This means the offerings of the hot Jersey City, NJ predictive analytics firm now work with the Big Data and In-Memory Analytics appliances from the world’s biggest database vendor.  And this is in addition to similar integration with SAP HANA that was announced in May.

    Also read: SAP HANA teams with Opera Solutions for real-time packaged analytics
  • On Monday, October 8th, Alteryx announced the release of Alteryx Strategic Analytics 8.0, and the Alteryx Analytics Gallery.  Alteryx provides cloud-based analytics, as well as a platform and tools supporting development of specialized applications that utilize these capabilities.  Alteryx is working hard to bring a self-service, "apps"-like interface to Big Data analytics.  That’s a tall order, but even mere efforts at democratizing this technology are valuable.
  • On Tuesday, October 9th, IBM unveiled its PureData System, including Pure Data System for Transactions, PureData System for Analytics and PureData System for Operational Analytics, as new members in its PureSystems group of "expert integrated systems."  The PureData System for Transactions focuses on retail and credit card transactions; the System for Analytics is a Netezza-powered platform for accelerated deployment of data warehouse and analytics solutions; and the System for Operational Analytics supports real-time analytics for ongoing business operations like call centers, energy grids and credit card fraud operations.
  • Also on October 9th, Cloudant, which offers a cloud-hosted flavor of popular NoSQL document store CouchDB, announced the integration of Apache Lucene into the product. Lucene provides sophisticated full-text indexing and search services, useful in operational database and Big Data applications alike.  For example, Mahout, the machine learning/predictive analytics technology that snaps onto Apache Hadoop, uses Lucene.  And here’s a neat factoid: Cloudera’s architect Doug Cutting is a creative force behind both Lucene and Hadoop itself.

Again, these developments are just a Big Data news nosh.  The big meal hits next week during Strata + Hadoop World New York.  At that event, I’ll be meeting in person with Cloudera, MapR, Hadapt, LucidWorks (the biggest company behind the Lucene project), RainStor, SAP, Talend, Greenplum/EMC, SiSense, Pentaho, Couchbase, and SAS.  I’m also hoping to speak with ParAccel and Hortonworks.  It’s going to be a marathon couple of days for me, and I’ll summarize the news and announcements for you here, in condensed form.

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