It's MADness

[Steve Bennett]

I recently come across the following quote that should give heart to those of you who wonder if the GFC and Analytics is a good combination:

If you are looking for a career where your services will be in high demand, you should find something where you provide a scarce, complementary service to something that is getting ubiquitous and cheap. 

So what’s getting ubiquitous and cheap? 

Data. And what is complementary to data? Analysis.

Prof. Hal Varian, UC Berkeley,
Chief Economist at Google

I found the quote in an interesting case study that talks about the "emerging practice of Magnetic, Agile, Deep (MAD) data analysis as a radical departure from traditional Enterprise Data Warehouses and Business Intelligence." I think that the research/paper is sponsored by Greenplum (but I could be wrong). 

It discusses the development of MAD analytics for Fox Interactive Media, using a large installation of the Greenplum Database system. Greenplum has recently claimed a load speed of 4TB an hour by one of their customers.

I post the whole paper fyi. 

Download 200903_madskills-032009

The original can be found here.

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