The original purpose of a data silo was to keep secrets. People have been keeping secrets for a long, long time. Prior to the written word, keeping a secret meant not sharing specific information with anyone else, verbally. And then came the written word. Secrets could be shared accidentally, or even stolen. Life became more […]
Using a Data Lake Engine to Provide Self-Service Insights
Understanding and fulfilling customer needs is the key to business success, and customer data is the foundation upon which that success is built. Accessing and analyzing data is almost always dependent on data engineers and other IT staff, while decision-makers wait to receive insights. One way to skip the wait, and deliver data directly to […]
IoT vs. Serverless Computing
The Internet of Things (IoT) describes an interconnected network of physical and digital devices, sensors, mechanical components, and communication protocols with the ability to transfer and exchange data machine-to-machine or machine-to-interactions. The serverless computing model is cloud-based and all its resources are managed by the service provider. The client is charged based on the consumption […]
Fundamentals of Document Databases
A document database (sometimes referred to as a “document store” or a “document-oriented database”), is a NoSQL or non-relational database. But, document databases use an index to associate “keys” with “documents,” making it more efficient at retrieving data. Unlike relational databases, document databases are not structured with a format of rows and columns, but scale […]
The Future of Blockchain
The media focus around blockchain over the last five to ten years has shifted from the currency bitcoin to the underlying database technology, which is a distributed ledger technology(DLT), now used in a wide variety of use cases. So, what is the reason behind blockchain suddenly gaining so much traction? McKinsey Report’s Blockchain’s Potentials, Limitations, […]
Data Orchestration Brings Your Data Closer and Makes Access Faster
Data orchestration means trying to bring order and speed to a complex Big Data ecosystem, a conglomeration of storage systems like Amazon S3, Apache HDFS, or OpenStack Swift and computation frameworks and applications such as Apache Spark and Hadoop MapReduce. The data stack is fragmented and performance-challenged by a proliferation of data silos. The technology […]
Case Study: Data Protection and HCI for Carrs Tool Data Architecture Upgrade
“Existing conditions” is a term for conditions that don’t last very long. Amazon changed the face of retail. Google democratized access to information. Facebook and pretty much every social media site has changed the way we interact with each other. Change came to Carrs Tool Steels, too. The U.K. supplier of tool steel and high-strength […]
Graph Databases: An Overview
The concept of graph databases traces back to Leonhard Euler. Euler was an 18th century Swiss mathematician who made several important discoveries in mathematics, such as infinitesimal calculus. In solving the “Seven Bridges of Königsberg” problem in 1736, Euler laid the foundations for graph theory. (He also got a fun shout-out in Hidden Figures when […]
Harvest Data Lineage to Build Effective Data Governance
Being able to trace data from its origin to its destination is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s a must-have if you are to govern data — and of course you’ve got to govern data. Without metadata, data lineage can’t exist, and if data lineage can’t exist, neither can Data Governance. Metadata brings together assets and […]
Bringing Hyperconvergence Architecture and VDIs to Everyone
A hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) uses software and/or hardware to create an IT infrastructure that virtualizes all of the needed elements to create an efficient and highly functional computer processing system. An HCI includes compute, networking, and a storage combined together in a virtualized environment, and normally runs on easily purchased, off-the-shelf commercial servers. The primary […]