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Andrea Serafini

Blogs from this Author

Time Well Spent in 2015

The end of 2015 is fast approaching, with December looming just a week away. For most people, December is packed with the hustle and bustle of last-minute gift shopping, or end-of-year projections and budgets for 2016. Often in the sway of all this activity, many are so focused on the approaching New Year that they […]

Qlik Makes Sense … the .Next Big Thing?

In my blog post about ‘Qlik Leadership’ – back in April – I pointed out how Qlik was going to reinvent itself and the BI market once again. A few months later Qlik Sense was released. Qlik Sense Desktop is a Windows-based desktop application, and I view it as Qlik’s first installment on the .Next […]

Data Science = Synergistic Teamwork

Data science is a discipline conflating elements from various fields such as mathematics, machine learning, statistics, computer programming, data warehousing, pattern recognition, uncertainty modeling, computer science, high performance computing, visualization and others. According to Cathy O’Neil and Rachel Schutt, two luminaries in the field of Data Science, there are about seven disciplines that even data scientists in training […]

A little stuffed animal called Hadoop

Doug Cutting – Hadoop creator – is reported to have explained how the name for his Big Data technology came about: “The name my kid gave a stuffed yellow elephant. Short, relatively easy to spell and pronounce, meaningless, and not used elsewhere: those are my naming criteria.” The term, of course, evolved over time and […]

SAP HANA and Hadoop – complementary or competitive?

In my last blog post, we learned about SAP HANA… or as I called it, “a database on steroids”. Here is what SAP former CTO and Executive Board Member, Vishal Sikka, told InformationWeek: “Hana is a full, ACID-compliant database, and not just a cache or accelerator. All the operations happen in memory, but every transaction […]

SAP HANA – A ‘Big Data’ Enabler

Some interesting facts and figures for your consideration: 90% – of stored data in the world today was created in the past 2 years 50% – annual data growth rate 34,000 – tweets sent each minute 9,000,000 – daily Amazon orders 7,000,000,000 – daily Google Page Views 2.5 Exabyte – amount of data created every day (an Exabyte […]

Thoughts on DNA and Big Data

DNA – DeoxyriboNucleic Acid – is a molecule that encodes the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms… this is the most common text book definition. Soon, a second definition may need to be added to the dictionary, one where DNA equals ‘biological’ storage. As a matter of fact, […]

Qlik leadership – vision, guts and glory… hopefully

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” – Supposedly Darwin from ‘Origin of Species’… or NOT According to the most recent report from Gartner, no one vendor is fully addressing the critical space in the market […]

QlikView… QlikTech… Qlik…

Several years ago, when I started using QlikView (QlikTech’s flagship product), I had a strong preference for more traditional BI tools and platforms, mostly because I thought that QlikView was just a visualization tool. But after some first-hand experience with the tool, any bias I had was quickly dissipated and I’ve been a QlikView fan […]