When Hortonworks announced they were going to buy Onyara I have to admit I had never heard of Onyara and had no idea what technology or value they would be bringing to the Hadoop table. To be acquired there had to be something interesting I was missing. So, Starting with a basis of no knowledge, my natural curiosity kicked in. For the past few days I have been trying to learn about Onyara and the technology they were involved with. This blog reflects a little of what I have learnt. I welcome any comments or additional information to help all of us learn more.
Monthly Archives: September 2015
Recent Hadoop News covering Hortonworks, Cloudera and MapR!
Hadoop is moving forwards at a rather remarkable pace. It seems like there are almost daily announcements of new partnerships, new deployment options and regular customer success stories.
What follows is a round up of some of those I think are interesting, and important, from the past month with a few of my thoughts by vendor. Let me know in the comments if I missed something you think is important!
Continue reading Recent Hadoop News covering Hortonworks, Cloudera and MapR!
Donut chart data visualizations are useless!
Let me just start out by saying that donut chart data visualizations are useless, in my humble opinion, and in this post I am going to try explain why I hold this view.
Before doing that let I want to state that the use of data visualizations can be very powerful when used correctly. Data visualization can help you “see” things in your data which conventional tables could not so easily expose. There is absolutely no doubt that a collection of good data visualizations deliver information more effectively than a list of tables. There is also no refuting the fact that a lot of data can be displayed on a great data visualization allowing an overview which is just not possible via tables. At the same time there are downsides especially if poor data visualizations require more time to understand than either a table or a different form of data visualization.
Continue reading Donut chart data visualizations are useless!
Are annual performance reviews a crutch for a bad manager?
Annual Performance Reviews seem to be on the way out! The internet is awash with stories of organizations stopping the execution of Annual Peformance reviews. Deloitte, Accenture, National Australia Bank, GE and more have all come out publicly to say they are doing away with them.
As someone who has managed people, for more than 15 years, I think this is a welcome move. I believe annual performance reviews are a crutch for a bad manager that really only provides marginal benefits to managing and leading a team unless there is really no other feedback happening. In addition they mostly fail in reaching its primary aim which is to help team members excel over time by providing them with feedback.
Continue reading Are annual performance reviews a crutch for a bad manager?
Is it the end for Big Data?
When Gartner published their recent “2015 Hype Cycle For Emerging Technologies” they did something many were not expecting. They removed Big Data.
Now rewind back to March 2014 – it is not that long ago. I was honoured to be a member of the sponsor panel at the Gartner BI Summit in London. During that session they asked each of the panellists if the term Big Data would still be around in 3 years time. My answer was that I thought the term would be gone by then (read a CBR article here). Here is the quote of what I said from the CBR article “My personal view about this is Big Data has been around forever and it will keep growing. Technology is going to change so it will move forward, but frankly it is just a buzzword, it will go away, there will be something else”
Is this latest Gartner move the end of Big Data as a term? Is my prediction coming true?