One of the downsides of companies gathering vast volumes of data is making sense of what it is and what it can do for you. Part of the problem is knowing what tool or tools you need. Do you need a better database? SQL or NoSQL? Relational database, object orientated (OO) database or distributed database? Is a data warehouse the right solution? Much depends on what you are trying to do and for many enterprises, they really don’t know.
This has led to many buying in lots of tools and then struggling to get the real value out of them. The costs of installing, moving data, training staff and support are all high. The perceived lack of value has meant that companies are looking for alternatives. One of the big beneficiaries here has been open source tooling where the software is free and companies just pay for support.
At the Kafka Summit in London, Enterprise Times caught up with Rachel Perdreschi, Head of Global Field Engineering, Imply Data. Apache Druid is one of the latest incubating products from the Apache Foundation. With 20 years of experience in the data warehousing market, Perdreschi has seen a lot of technologies come and go, be successful and not so successful.
One of the big challenges that Perdreschi sees is that all the technologies we see inside large enterprises are hitting the same problem. It doesn’t matter how you store the data, if customers cannot query it and get the answers they want, it really isn’t delivering. Where Perdreschi sees Druid changing the game is in how it supports interactive data applications. This is not just about creating queries and waiting for a response. She refers to it as a conversation with the data.
Druid is also designed to solve the problem of large numbers of disparate sources. Enterprises, spend vast amounts of time spent trying to reconcile and normalise data. Perdreschi explains how Druid takes a very different approach to that.
To hear more of what Perdreschi had to say listen to the podcast.
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