5 Ways To Verify What Your Big Data Is Telling You

5 Ways To Verify What Your Big Data Is Telling You

This past Monday I watched the Bowl Championship Series title game between the (American-style) football teams from Auburn University and Florida State University. As is my usual custom when watching sports between teams for which I have no rooting interest, I spend time looking for statistics to help me decide where to place my loyalties for … Read more

Do You Have A Big Data Problem?

You have a big data problem.

Still don’t think you have a big data problem? I’m here to tell you that you’re doing it wrong. Everyone has a big data problem, they just don’t know it yet. Two weeks ago at the PASS Business Analytics Conference I heard Steven Levitt talk about how there is a severe shortage of people in … Read more

Predictive Analysis: I Bet You Didn’t Know I Would Blog This Today

Quick question: Where would you go to find some basil in your local grocery store? Did you say “by the other herbs?” Or did you say “by the tomatoes?” If you are like me, then you would go looking for basil by the other herbs because, well, that is a natural, logical grouping of products. … Read more

The Santa Cruz Experiment: Why You Should Care About Big Data

[This was first posted to Technorati on February 6th, 2012. You can read the original here.] I keep hearing the term “Big Data”. My old-school IT instincts always makes me think of inefficiently storing two-letter state abbreviation codes inside of an nvarchar(50) field because that’s the default data type you get when creating a database table … Read more

SQL 2008 Data Mining

I often hear people use the terms “Data Mining” and “Data Analysis” as if they are interchangeable. To me, at least, they mean two very distinct things. Hopefully this post will help to explain what I believe to be the difference in their meanings. So, let’s say you are opening up a mine. First things … Read more