On June 11, the Spark team announced availability of Release 1.4. More than 210 contributors from 70 different organizations contributed more than 1,000 patches. Spark continues to expand its contributor base, the best measure of health for an open source project. Spark Core The Spark team continues to improve Spark operability, performance and compatibility. Key enhancements include: The first phase in
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Stories about SAS Visual Analytics are among the most widely read posts on this blog. In the last two years I’ve received many queries from readers who complain that it’s hard to get clear answers about the software from SAS. In software procurement, the customer has bargaining power until the deal closes; after that, power shifts to the vendor.
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Strata+Hadoop World week is a good opportunity to update the list of platforms for high-performance advanced analytics. Vendors are hustling this week to announce their latest enhancements; I’ll post updates as needed. First some definition. The scope of this analysis includes software with the following properties: Support for supervised and unsupervised machine learning Support for distributed processing Open platform or multi-vendor
Read moreIn a previous post, I summarized some myths about SAS and R — arguments offered by proponents of one or the other that deserve to be dismissed. In this post, I will review some arguments that do make sense — things to consider if you are an aspiring analyst or if you are an executive making decisions about software for
Read moreWhich is better for analytics, SAS or R? One frequently sees discussions on this topic in social media; for examples, see here, here, here, here, here and here. Like many debates in social media, the degree of conviction is often inverse to the quantity of information, and these discussions often produce more heat than light. The question is serious. Many
Read moreSkytree started out as an academic machine learning project developed at Georgia Tech’s Fastlab. Leadership shopped the software to a number of software vendors prior to 2011 and, finding no buyers, launched as a standalone venture in 2012. In April 2013, Skytree announced Series A funding of $18 million, with backing from U.S. Venture Partners, UPS, Javelin Venture Partners and
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Updated May 22, 2014 0xdata (“Hexa-data”) is a small group of smart people from Stanford and Silicon Valley with VC backing and an open source software project for advanced analytics (H2O). Founded in 2011, 0xdata first appeared on analyst dashboards in 2012 and has steadily built a presence in the data science community since then. 0xdata operates on a services
Read moreHere is a quick review of the capabilities for advanced analytics in Hadoop for five vendors at the recent Strata NYC conference: 0xData Alpine Data Labs Oracle SAS Skytree 0XData Product(s) H20 (open source project) h2o (R package) Description Smart people from Stanford with VC backing and a social media program. Services business model with open source software. H20 is an
Read moreSAS’ recent announcement of an alliance with Hortonworks marks a good opportunity to summarize SAS’ Hadoop capabilities. Analytic enterprises are increasingly serious about using Hadoop as an analytics platform; organizations with significant “sunk” investment in SAS are naturally interested in understanding SAS’ ability to work with Hadoop. Prior to January, 2012, a search for the words “Hadoop” or “MapReduce”
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SAS charged its sales force with selling 2,000 licenses for Visual Analytics in 2013; the jury is still out on whether they met this target. There’s lots of marketing action lately from SAS about this product, so here’s an FAQ. Update: SAS recently announced 1,400 sites licensed for Visual Analytics. In SAS lingo, a site corresponds roughly to one machine,
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