Greenplum Days – Day 2
At this point it’s the afternoon of Day 2 of the two day Greenplum Days conference. As a non-C level person I have gotten very little exposure to what the inner workings of Greenplum Chorus is, I have a feeling that isn’t an accident as people of my level would nail Greenplum with a multitude of technical questions on a product that is in it’s early stages. What I have gathered from the bit and pieces that I’ve come across is that Chorus is going to be social networking tool wrapped around data intelligence and analytics. Holy hand grenades does that sounds extremely unexciting. Really though it is exciting and what data has been screaming for. You see more and more companies opening up APIs to get at their data on the web and data sharing is becoming more common place. Tim O’Reilly and Scott McNealy while on totally separate ends of the political spectrum both agree that Open Data is the next big thing and where there is going to be lots of energy in the coming years. In order to compete with data giants like Google or Microsoft the little guys are going to need to share data. It’s obvious, the crazy thing is that we’re talking about company to company data sharing when for most business out there just sharing data and the insights it has internally prods a sore spot. Chorus looks to be a gateway to the data and tools to chronicle the insights gained on those datasets. Not only for your Greenplum cluster but aimed at pulling any sort of data that is out there. Software engineers seems to have all the fun for the last decade or so and now it’s the data engineers turn to step up and play, because the hardware and tools are there to allow sculptures to be created out of the seemingly infinite sand. Right now it seems Chorus is more of an idea and if it the product representation of it works it will launch new data insights throughout an enterprise. If it works in that realm the next challenge will be to see if it launches a revolution in cross company business sharing. I don’t know if Chorus is the solution for that or some other representation of the idea will be the one that steps up to the plate and knocks it out of the park. It will happen though, the pitches are being thrown and batters are warming up, the game is already in progress.