What’s the most interesting thing to happen to software development in recent years?
No it’s not your phone or oversized tablet it’s writing code and having it execute in parallel across tens, hundreds or even thousands of Intel CPU cores in an organised and controlled fashion.
That’s how the Googles and Facebooks of the world do it and that’s how the EMC Data Computing Product Division will do it.
The great thing about the Data Computing Product Division is that it will bring Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) of huge volumes of structured information, leveraging multi-socket and multi-core technology, right into the existing data centres of non-webby industries allowing them to analyse their data via things like Structured Query Language, MapReduce, the R programming language and so on and so on.
You take your data, load it into the Greenplum Database and it automatically distributes that data across all the nodes and processes it in parallel running whatever level of sophisticated analysis you require.
You don’t need to partition or tune it and scalability is linear in accordance to the number of nodes you add.
So you have this fault tolerant MPP database and you’ve run huge data sets through it. It’s the engine that powers your analysis efforts. Brilliant. Where’s the value to different levels of the organisation?
That’s where Greenplum Chorus comes into play. Chorus provides a self service analytic infrastructure using the GreenPlum Database as the parallel processing engine.
Your Data Warehouse is the single source of truth for your entire organisation but it probably isn’t the only data source in the organisation. Load all that data into Chorus, your Data Warehouse and any other sources you so choose, and analysts can rapidly provision sandboxes where they can mash up different kinds of analysis then present those results upwards at different levels of granularity.
The power analysts get the view from every point in space or whatever points they specify, the Executives get something that looks like it’s a post on their Facebook wall with just the facts they need to make a decision.
And all is right with the world.
