In a recent conversation with Michael Howard, VP of Marketing at Greenplum, the topic of the data scientist came to the fore. There is a great deal of noise in the media about data scientists, not surprisingly, because they are deemed to be "the gods of big data," and you can argue that indeed they are.  

As 2012 comes to a close, we look back on one of the most exciting years that we can remember in business intelligence (BI) and business analytics (BA). One trend that made significant progress this year has been the integration of Big Data Hadoop platforms and existing enterprise data warehouses (EDW). We have endured the past several years of Big Data hype, waiting patiently as the potential of this emerging technology gained acceptance.   

What is an analytics platform? Not that long ago it meant buying a server running SAS, SPSS or some other data mining software. The conventional wisdom was that the data warehouse didn't provide a suitable platform for the work. There were many reasons for having an independent environment: the analysts used specific sets of data that weren't in the data warehouse, the tools they used ran only on flat files, the server-based licensing was too expensive to use on large database servers, the processing slowed down the interactive business intelligence workloads.