February 1, 2007
What’s interesting about the FAST venture in BI
FAST is annoying me a bit these days. It’s nothing serious, but travel schedule screw-up’s, an annoying embargo, and a screw-up in the annoying embargo have all hit at once. So I’ll keep this telegraphic and move on to other subjects.
- They’re doing fast queries without using a lot of RAM.
- They’re doing the usual text search thing of indexing across multiple “databases,” only now it’s applied to, well, databases. (Not that there’s much new about that particular aspect. Actually, there seems to be a bit of kludge in that they export the databases to some kind of simple text files.)
- They’re doing some level of concept identification ala the text mining guys. (They don’t call it “entity extraction” because the results aren’t dumped into a database anywhere, but instead are just used on the fly.) Of course, the text mining/search convergence goes both ways.
- They bought a BI/dashboard tool and are using it both to analyze query logs and also to do normal BI/dashboard kinds of things.
- They have big references for this stuff, at least the single-web-site query aspect. Well, actually, the customer names are confidential. Oh well.
And as another example of how this wasn’t the smoothest PR month for FAST, Steve Arnold somehow got the false idea that they were getting out of true text search altogether.
Categories: BI integration, Enterprise search, FAST, Search engines, Text mining
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[…] QlikTech’s story is consistent with a variety of trends I see generally underway. The memory-centric aspect is shared with SAP and Applix. In particular, their technical story is very similar to SAP’s BI Accelerator, although I agree with QlikTech’s estimate that QlikView has close to 100X the customers BI Accelerator does. The columnar story is also on the rise in VLDB-land, as exemplified by Vertica and Kognitio. And the “leave the data in place” story is similar to what fellow Scandinavian FAST has been talking about lately. […]
[…] Search-based BI is trying to circumvent the data warehouse deployment process. […]
[…] Andrew McKay was at FAST, I grumped about his search/BI integration story. Now that he’s trying to do the same thing at a startup called Attivio, it sounds more […]