by Angela Guess
Shant Hovsepian recently wrote in Datanami, “When looking at BI tools for your organization, there are 10 ‘Commandments’ you should live by. First Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Move Big Data. Moving Big Data is expensive: it is big, after all, so physics is against you if you need to load it up and move it. Avoid extracting data out into data marts and cubes, because ‘extract’ means moving, and creates big-data-sized problems in maintenance, network performance additional CPU — on two copies that are logically the same. Pushing BI down to the lower layers to run at the data is what motivated Big Data in the first place.”
His list continues, “Second Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Steal!…Or Violate Corporate Security Policy. Security’s not optional. The sadly regular drumbeat of data breaches shows it’s not easy, either. Look for BI tools that can leverage the security model that’s already in place. Big Data can make this easier, with unified security systems like Ranger, Sentry and Knox; even Mongo has an amazing security architecture now. All these models allow you to plug right in, propagate user information all the way up to the application layer, and enforce a visualization’s authorization and the data lineage associated with it along the way. Security as a service: use it.”
Hovsepina goes on, “Third Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Pay for Each User, Nor Every Gigabyte. One of the fundamental beauties of Big Data is that when done right, it can be extremely cost effective. Putting five petabytes of data into Oracle could break the bank; but you can do just that in a big data system. That said, there are certain price traps you should watch out for before you buy. Some BI applications charge users by the gigabyte, or by gigabyte indexed. Caveat emptor! It’s totally common to have geometric, exponential, logarithmic growth in data and in adoption with big data. Our customers have seen deployments grow from tens of billions of entries to hundreds of billions in a matter of months, with a user base up by 50x.”
photo credit: Flickr/ In Da Mist