Architecting for Access: Simplifying Analytics on Big Data Infrastructure

In this special technology white paper, Architecting for Access: Simplifying Analytics on Big Data Infrastructure, you’ll learn how designing systems for data analytics is a bit of a trapeze act—requiring you to balance front-end convenience and access  without compromising on back-end precision and speed. Whether you are evaluating the upgrade of current solutions or considering the roll-out of a brand new greenfield platform, planning an analytics workload today requires making a lot of tough decisions.

Providing a full end-to-end solution requires not only evaluating a dozen or so technologies for each tier, but also looking at their many permutations. And at each juncture, we must remember we’re not just building technology for technology’s  sake—we’re hoping to provide analytics (often in near real time) that drive insight, action, and better decision making. Making decisions based on “data, not opinions” is the end game, and the technologies we choose must always be focused on that. It’s a dizzying task.

OLTP, OLAP, data lake, ETL, EDW

Only by looking at the past, present, and future of the technologies can we have any hope of providing a realistic view of the challenges and possible solutions.

This white paper is meant to be both an exploration of how the analytics ecosystem has evolved into what it is, as well as a glimpse into the future of both analytics and the systems behind it. By starting from both ends, we hope to arrive in the middle—the present—with a pragmatic list of requirements for an analytics stack that will deal with anything you can throw at it today and tomorrow. Before we can look at the requirements for a front-end analytics tool, however, it’s paramount that we look at the reality of the back-end.

The white paper includes the following sections:

• Why and How Data Became So Fractured
• The Tangled Data Web of Modern Enterprises
• Requirements for Accessing and Analyzing the Full Data Web
• Analytics/Visualization Vendor Overview
• Key Takeaways

The Architecting for Access: Simplifying Analytics on Big Data Infrastructure white paper is available for download in PDF from the insideBIGDATA White Paper Library, courtesy of Looker.