Datameer has announced version 4.0 of its flagship product, a self-service and schema-free big data analytics application for Hadoop. By providing a new “flipside” view to Datameer’s spreadsheet interface, users of Datameer 4.0 can get instant visual feedback at any point in the big data analytics process. This allows them to check initial results and adjust appropriately as they go, shortening the time to insight and freeing up time for teams to identify new big data analytic use cases.
Big data analytics is challenging because the data is so raw and the sources are so different, explains Karen Hsu, senior director, product marketing at Datameer. “We have heard from data analysts and data scientists that they are spending 80% of their time on 'data wrangling' to clean it up and make it usable.”
There are three primary challenges with big data analytics, says Hsu. The first is that there are multiple tools, causing data quality issues, and second, the fact that most of the tools are IT tools and not for business users. “You have a lot of SQL-on-Hadoop offerings and SQL is great for an IT person but business analysts are used to spreadsheets,” said Hsu. And a third issue is the problem of being able to visually inspect the data only at the end of the process as opposed to the beginning and every step of the way.
Prior to the new release, said Hsu, analysts building big data reports and visualizations would be unsure if data joins or transformations presented any new issues until the entire data set was processed with Hadoop and ultimately visualized with charts, graphs or infographics.
The new workflow in Datameer 4.0 consists of visual data profiling after every ingest, join, or transformation all the way through to the final big data visualization. Datameer’s new data profiling capabilities allow analysts to simply “flip” any spreadsheet to see a visual profile of the data. This visual representation helps analysts understand the shape and quality of their data immediately after each ingest or transformation.
Additionally, Datameer has updated its Smart Analytics interactive data-mining module with the same instant visual insight paradigm, enabling the end-to-end analytics workflow that business analysts require. With Datameer’s optional Smart Analytics module for business analysts, users can now flip the spreadsheet to see an interactive visualization of the results from any advanced analytics and data mining work. These visualizations are powered by Datameer’s drag-and-drop Decision Tree, Clustering, Column Dependencies and Recommendation Engine algorithms, which help users quickly identify patterns and relationships in their data without the help of a data scientist.
For more information on Datameer, visit www.datameer.com.