AtScale Blog

Wouldn’t it be great if you could load all of your data from a single file into an Excel pivot table for easy analysis? 

Unfortunately, this approach isn’t usually viable when dealing with complex business analytics and big data.  Take for example a typical use case found inthe world of healthcare insurance.  A large insurance provider has 10s of millions of members, and processes 100s of millions of claims a year.  As flexible as Excel is, we all know it won’t handle this volume or velocity of data. 

As a result, more and more enterprises store  large data sets in big data platforms like Hadoop.  And while Hadoop provides a low-cost and performant approach to store and process this information, there is still the challenge of supporting the many types of analytics required on claims and member data sets.  But why? Why and how, with all of the advances in technology, can a simple calculation cause so much complexity?

Digital transformation is a broad term that has various meanings by application, but in general, it means that more and more of what organizations, people, governments do is happening in computers, mobile devices and networks. As a result, the way things are done is changing, especially in the way things are connected. So in this new world of data flying everywhere, being generated and consumed, where does one stop for a second to take a look at what’s going on?

Just this week, AtScale published the Q4 Edition of our BI-on-Hadoop Benchmark, and we found 1.5X to 4X performance improvements across SQL engines Hive, Spark, Impala and Presto for Business Intelligence and Analytic workloads on Hadoop.

Bottom line, the benchmark results are great news for any company looking to analyze their big data in Hadoop because you can now do so faster, on more data, for more users than ever before.

While this blog provides a high level summary of our findings, you can access the full Q4 2016 Edition of the BI-on-Hadoop Benchmarks here, and also listen to our webinar replay discussing this in more details here.

We started AtScale because we believe that everyone should be able to use all data for all their decisions.  We believe that people should have unencumbered and secured access to information, work with data of all shapes, at lighting speed and in the tools they are already familiar with like Tableau and Microsoft Excel.  

Since the 1980s, the world has been using OLAP technology to provide a business interface to analyze data stored in traditional ERP and CRM systems. As the demand for insights increased, MOLAP and ROLAP became key technologies.

With all of the different OLAP options out there, you may wonder which one can actually help you achieve your big data strategy. Which strategy is most suitable for your Hadoop environment?

However, there is one key issue with a heteregeous BI environment: each tool uses a different protocol so data has to be customized to work with each BI tool.    

For instance, Excel uses MDX and Tableau prefers SQL.   What if your company uses new tools like Looker or even open-source tools like Apache Zeppelin? 

How can your deliver one version of the truth to all users, regardless the tool they use? This post helps you get there.  

The growing popularity of big data analytics coupled with the adoption of technologies like Spark and Hadoop have allowed enterprises to collect an ever increasing amount of data - in terms of breadth and volume.  At the same time, the need for traditional business analysis of these data sets using widely adopted tools like Microsoft Excel, Tableau, and Qlik still remains.  Historically data is provided to these visualization front ends using OLAP interfaces and data structures. OLAP makes the data easy for business users to consume, and offers interactive performance for the types of queries that the business intelligence (BI) tools generate. 

However, as data volumes explode, reaching hundreds of terabytes or even petabytes of data, traditional OLAP servers have a hard time scaling.  To surmount this modern data challenge, many leading enterprises are now in search of the next generation of business intelligence capabilities, falling into the category of scale-out BI.  In this blog I'll  share how you can leverage the familiar interface and performance of an OLAP server while scaling out to the largest of data sets. 

And if you don't have time to read the whole thing, don't miss the 10-minute 'cliff-note' video of scale-out BI on Hadoop near the end.

As more and more enterprises adopt Hadoop as their next generation data platform, the demands of traditional enterprise workloads, including support for Business Intelligence use cases, are creating challenges.  While Hadoop excels at low-cost distributed storage and parallel data processing, interactive support for BI-style queries remains a challenge.  Additionally, multi-dimensional queries often demand complex OLAP-style calculations and functions.  In this post we will share how AtScale helps to bridge the gap between Business Intelligence users and data that resides in Hadoop.

In many typical business analyses or applications it is important to be able to directly query the first or last value of a particular metric across a hierarchy.  For example:

• What was the starting or ending price of a security during a particular day
• What were inventory levels for a SKU at the beginning and end of the month
• What was the first and last payment amount for a loan agreement

Not Always as Easy as it Sounds

Executing such a query using SQL may involve complex queries consisting of unions, sub-queries, and/or temporary tables.  In MDX (Multidimensional Expression Language) such a query is easier to support, given MDX’s rich support for analytical queries and hierarchical representation.  AtScale has implemented support for First Child and Last Child measures in a way that supports BOTH SQL and MDX clients, which means that virtually any data visualization client can take advantage of this advanced functionality.