Business Intelligence Tools For Hadoop and Big Data

	Hadoop Illuminated > Business Intelligence Tools For Hadoop and Big Data

Chapter 13. Business Intelligence Tools For Hadoop and Big Data

Table of Contents

13.1. The case for BI Tools
13.2. BI Tools Feature Matrix Comparison
13.3. Glossary of terms

13.1. The case for BI Tools

Analytics for Hadoop can be done by the following:

Writing custom Map Reduce code using Java, Python, R ..etc
Using high level Pig scripts
Using SQL using Hive

How ever doing analytics like this can feel a little pedantic and time consuming. Business INtelligence tools (BI tools for short) can address this problem.

BI tools have been around since before Hadoop. Some of them are generic, some are very specific towards a certain domain (e.g. Telecom, Health Care ..etc). BI tools provide rich, user friendly environment to slice and dice data. Most of them have nice GUI environments as well.

13.2. BI Tools Feature Matrix Comparison

Since Hadoop is gaining popularity as a data silo, a lot of BI tools have added support to Hadoop. In this chapter we will look into some BI tools that work with Hadoop.

We are trying to present capabilities of BI tools in an easy to compare feature matrix format. This is a 'living' document. We will keep it updated as new versions and new features surface.

This matrix is under construction

How to read the matrix?
Y - feature is supported
N - feature is NOT supported
? or empty - unknown

Read the legend for feature descriptions.

Table 13.1. BI Tools Comparison : Data Access and Management

BI tool	Access raw data on Hadoop	Manage data on HDFS	Import/Export data into/out of HDFS	Transparent compression	Data Retention	Data validation
Datameer	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Tableau	Y
Pentaho						Y

Table 13.2. BI Tools Comparison : Analytics

BI tool	pre-built analytics	Predictive analytics	Time series forecasting	Recommendation engine	Analytics app store
Datameer	Y			Y	Y
Tableau	Y
Pentaho	Y	Y	Y

Table 13.3. BI Tools Comparison : Visualizing

BI tool	Visual query designer	Rich widgets	Multiple platforms (web,mobile)	Interactive dashboards	Share with others	Local rendering
Datameer	Y	Y	Y	Y
Tableau	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Pentaho	Y	Y	Y	Y

Table 13.4. BI Tools Comparison : Connectivity

BI tool	Hadoop	HBase	Cloudera Impala	Cassandra	MongoDB	Relational databases	Vertica	Teradata / Aster	Netezza	SAP HANA
Datameer	Y	Y		Y		Y		Y
Tableau			Y							Y
Pentaho	Y	Y		Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y

Table 13.5. BI Tools Comparison : Misc

BI tool	Security	Role based permissions	Supports multiple Hadoop Distributions	Supports Hadoop on Cloud	Hosted analytics	Free evaluation
Datameer	Y (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)	Y	Y	Y (Amazon)	N	Y
Tableau	Y (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)	Y	Y		Y	Y
Pentaho	Y (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)	Y	Y			Y

13.3. Glossary of terms

Data Validataion: Can validate data confirms to certain limits, can do cleansing and de-duping.
Share with others: Can share the results with others within or outside organization easily. (Think like sharing a document on DropBox or Google Drive)
Local Rendering: You can slice and dice data on locally on a computer or tablet. This uses the CPU power of the device and doesn't need a round-trip to a 'server' to process results. This can speed up ad-hoc data exploration
Analytics 'app store': The platform allows customers to buy third party analytics app. Think like APple App Store


Chapter 12. Big Data Ecosystem		Chapter 14. Hardware and Software for Hadoop