Category Archives: Tableau
Taking the Mystery out of Big Data
To shake off the mystery of this “Big Data,” it’s useful to know its history.
- Scale-out techniques to distribute data and process in parallel
- Lots of commodity hardware
- Open-source software (in particular, Apache Hadoop)
- The “Common” modules, handling features such as administration, management, and security
- The distributed data engine, known as Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)
- The parallel-processing engine (either the traditional MapReduce framework now known as YARN or an emerging one called Spark)
- A distributed data warehouse feature on top of the HDFS (HBase for standard reporting needs or Cassandra for active, operational needs)
- Programmatically with languages (e.g., Java, Python, Scala, or R), you can use Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) or a Command Line Interface (CLI)
- Streaming data using the Apache Flume software
- Batch file transfers using the Sqoop module
- Messages using the Kafka product
- Programmatically with languages
- Hbase, Hive with HiveQL, or Pig with PigLatin which all provide easier access than using MapReduce against the underlying distributed file system
- Elasticsearch or Solr for searching
- Mahout for automated machine learning
- Drill, an always-active “daemon” process, which acts as a query engine for data exploration
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Information Builders Talking Big Data at Summit 2015
Be sure to attend the following sessions:
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Wendy’s Wins Big with BI/Analytics
IB wrote this about Wendy’s enterprise dashboard:
“The Wendy’s Company, the world’s third largest quick-service hamburger company, created a BI portal and dashboard environment that integrates an enterprise point-of-sale system to deliver targeted reports with drill-down capabilities for decision-makers at every level of the company. WebFOCUS helps managers control costs and make informed decisions that improve the bottom line. Thousands of international and domestic franchises currently use WebFOCUS dashboards, helping Wendy’s to improve profit margins at hundreds of restaurants.”
At the beginning, the idea was for an “above-the-store” executive portal where a few individuals could see all of the company’s KPIs related to revenue, speed of service, costs, and customer satisfaction. However, it did not take long before thousands of decision makers at different levels of the QSR organization asked for access to that valuable information.
For more information, see IB’s press release.
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Lessons from Doorbell Replacement
That was the task my wife gave me and it appeared within my abilities. Surely, I could be done within an hour.
My wife had already spent thirty dollars on a brushed metal doorbell that looked nice during the day with a back-lit button you could see at night.
On Saturday, I jumped into action and removed the old buzzer button, a simple twenty-year old plastic box. I pulled the doorbell away from the door frame and undid the twisted wires. Quite brittle, they broke easily. To get more length, I tried to pull the wires out farther, but they would not budge. If I was not careful, I would have to instead buy a wireless doorbell.
I examined the new doorbell as I took it out of the package. While the old one had just laid on top of the wood, this one had an inch-long metal piece that was supposed to fit inside a 5/8-inch wide hole. A search of my tool box came up empty for that particular drill bit. Plus, I didn’t really believe the doorframe was deep enough.
“Look,” I explained to my wife, “this isn’t going to work” and presented various reasons to discard her plan.
With open disappointment, she agreed; I put the old button back in place. Ding dong, it still worked.
At the home improvement store, we bought a different thirty-dollar brushed-metal doorbell button; this one could lay flat against the door frame but did not have a light, a compromise.
On the next Saturday, I went back to work. How hard could this be?
I once again removed the old doorbell button. This new one had two pieces: a back that attached to the door frame with screws, and a front that snapped onto the back. The wires gave me grief, but I was finally able to attach the new doorbell button.
This one would not lay flat; some type of plastic protrusion on the back always got in the way. The last doorbell ringer needed a hole, so I considered that as a potential solution for this situation. I got out a power drill and started poking little holes in the door frame.
Ultimately, I was able to get the button to lay flat. When I tried to snap on the front, however, it would not close; something was preventing the snap from catching. I completely removed the doorbell, busted some more holes behind it, hooked it up again, took it off, and repeated several times.
By now I was frustrated. It wouldn’t snap close, so I decided to try to keep it shut with some Gorilla Glue.
No luck. With brown glue spots all over the door frame and a ruined doorbell, I had failed. Trying to remove the Gorilla Glue mess, I scrubbed off patches of door frame paint. I tossed the thirty-dollar buzzer in the trash and once again returned the old plastic one to its proper place. Ding dong, it still worked.
Okay, I needed to stop and think about this. What approach was best? I still had the original back-lit doorbell buzzer that my wife wanted. I needed the right tools to do the job.
I made another trip to the home improvement store and bought a 5/8-inch hole drill bit with diamond grit (coincidentally, another thirty dollars). While there, I picked up white paint to cover the Gorilla Glue fiasco.
On the third Saturday, I removed the old doorbell buzzer, drilled the hole, and put in the new buzzer; it just barely fit. With some silicon chalking around the button and some white paint to cover mistakes, all was good. Ding dong!
After replacing this legacy piece of hardware, here are some of my personal insights:
- I started without assessing the situation
- I never had a proper plan
- Having never done this before, I did not have the proper know-how, expertise, or skills
- I did not have the proper tools to do the job
- It took longer than expected (especially without plan, skills, or tools)
- It cost more than expected
- I could have saved by hiring a professional
My personal experience with a doorbell buzzer is similar to companies replacing their legacy business systems. How hard could it be, for example, to get rid of old reporting applications and convert all of the existing procedures to newer technology?
Upper management already bought the new BI product, so you just assign the conversion effort to the college intern. How hard could it be? Surely, she can knock it out quickly.
Ding dong: no up-front assessment, no planning, no accurate expectations as to time and cost, no specialized skills or tools, minimal progress every Saturday.
You may consider a legacy system modernization initiative as a one-off project your team can just fumble through and then forget about. That can be the painful approach and you may have to cover up mistakes afterwards. Before you do that, consider there are professionals who have done modernizations before and who have developed methodologies and automated software to reduce the time, cost, and risk.
Don’t be a ding dong.
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