Your Weekly BI News in a “New York Minute”

I’m a glutton for BI information to the point of addiction. A day rarely goes by without my “scanning” three hundred or so feeds, blogs, twits, websites and other news and information sources pertaining to business intelligence.  I did the same thing when I was on the software development side, mind you, but using significantly less online sources and way more books. I find BI to be so dynamic an industry that by the time most books are published, the information is already obsolete.  And that’s just on the technical side.  On the business front, things change and evolve even faster.

So I started looking around for an aggregated “digest” of the day’s salient BI news points. I was looking for something that spanned the multitude of industry areas in BI from engineering and product news (platform to front-end), to business development, partnerships, personnel (who quit, joined or got fired), distribution (SaaS and cloud issues), venture funding, important conferences, and so on.  In a nutshell, all the areas that affect our industry one way or another. To my surprise, I couldn’t find anything readily available.  Something someone could take on a train or pull down to a mobile device during a daily commute to get a quick “scoop” on the week’s happenings in BI.

Then I figured, why not try my hand at compiling such a list on a weekly basis.  I know this is fairly subjective, but while scanning my own sources, I always “pull over” several items for more in-depth examination. I do this very quickly (I’m a very fast reader) and often “bucketize” these links using Delicious.com for further examination and/or analysis.  Clearly people have different areas of interest but I figured this pruned list could benefit some folks with no more than a “New York Minute” to spare.

I’m not sure how best to format and present this yet. I didn’t want to start off with some sort of mailing list offering because, quite honestly, I’ve never stuck with a mailing list subscription more than a couple of weeks myself.  So for now I’m going to try and post this on my blog on a weekly basis every Friday.  If I detect minimal interest, then I’ll try another approach.  I'll also include more items in future weeks.  This is more of a "trial and error" endeavor at this point.  Meanwhile, and without further ado (or order), here’s my BI Digest for the week of October 5^th, 2009 "in a New York Minute".

• Discrete SaaS player 1010Data scores a big contract in the retails space by signing up Dollar General.
• MicroStrategy is far from Open Source but giving away software for free nevertheless now. Trojan horse or good value?
• Awesome webinar on what was learned in the past 20 years in BI compliments of Claudia Imhoff and WhereScape
• "But can it core a apple"? On integrating OLTP and OLAP in the same database engine. One of the most commented (and educational, for me) Curt Monash posts I’ve seen.
• First of a two-part in-depth series on MapReduce vs. relational databases.
• You might not be paying your DBA enough money to put up with this (alternatively, you might be using the wrong DBMS platform ).
• BI and DW “implementors“ take heed. You may need more duct tape after all (this doesn’t just apply to the software development community, believe me).
• For a deep (and I mean deep) dive into what customer analytics in retail are all about.
• A really novel (read: smart) way to engage your market without the BS, hassle and expenses of conventional physical conferences as described by Merv Adrian who tried it.
• Dashboards in Excel 2010 (yawn). Sorry it’s been hard to get excited about MSFT BI in, oh say about 18 months now.
• Can (or should) InfoBright actually kick MonetDB’s rear-end? The numbers are (almost) in.
• In-memory databases and the Kognitio men who love them.
• Well, looks like nobody is using EC2 after all (NOT!)
• Larry invites Marc to Oracle Open World next week. See rumors fly...
• At least one person is excited about Gemini (but it’s a monkey so..).
• If you live and breathe “fabric” and grok fiber over Ethernet, this one’s for you.

And that's the way BI is.  Goodnight, and enjoy your weekend!