Data Processing Unified - Omniscope

 There are lot of tools coming out in the market related to data management, analytics and visualization. It is also becoming harder for data practitioners to choose tools, so it is natural that we also expect to see consolidation of tools that handle data sourcing, management, transformation and visualization. One such tool that i got to see demonstrated is Omniscope. The link to get to see what the tool offer, please see here:https://visokio.com/. The tools goal is to unify the following components of a data journey

1. Data Sourcing
2. Data Blending - This is the step where you can combine data from different data sources. This will be very handy when say you are trying to combine customer information that is on a system different from Borrower/Loan information. This is an example, you will have scenarios where you have to perform this step.
3. Data Transformation - This is the step where you take the source or the blended data and add additional attributes/calculations based on your end business goal.
4. Data Lineage - The functionality that provides the journey of a data element as it flows from source to different target systems. This helps in also understanding how a data element is used in different calculations/reports.
5. Data Visualization - The layer that displays the data in different forms (like graphs, charts, plots)

The tool helps data curators/scientists/analyst to maintain the pipeline of data coming through and how it is to be consumed by users. There are plenty of visualizations available in this tool and the color schemes used are very good. This tool also attempts to maintain lineage of the data that is used for the report, thereby providing an opportunity for end to end governance. In addition to all of these, there are features related to scheduling and automation. Please refer to the link above for more in depth look at the features of this tool.

Tableau and R Integration...

Among the Data visualization tools, tableau is one of the leading tools which is used by lot of organizations in various capacities. The types of reporting range from operational to really sophisticated data visualizations combining various data sources. With R growing to be a language of choice for Data Science related activities such as Machine Learning and Data Mining, it is being integrated with a variety of Tools. Given such a scenario it was natural to expect the integration between tableau and R to happen. Please see the link below for a video on R and tableau integration.
http://www.tableau.com/new-features/r-integration
Quoting tableau" Tableau Server can also be configured to connect to an instance of Rserve through the tabadmin utility, allowing anyone to view a dashboard containing R functionality".
Also the link contains a whitepaper on integration between the two tools, please check out the same.
Lot of interesting things happening in the Data Science these days...

Power View - Analyzing Data...

There have been lot of buzz about Power BI/Power Viewer  and its use for Self service BI, also the options to connect to different data sources have been increasing. Here is a link below which discusses use of PowerView tool for analyzing cricket data as part of the world cup series. It is a fun experiment but at the same time provides insight into how PowerView works.
http://blogs.office.com/2015/04/03/cricket-world-cup-fever-analyzing-the-data-with-power-query/

Data Visualization...

The area of Data visualization has heated up with so many devices to choose from to display the data. With the rise of in memory BI offerings the level of data visualization has increased considerably. There are some niche players and some big vendors. The big companies are surely keeping an eye on the niche vendors which are doing well. The following blog entry talks about the Gartner report and takes a different view on the findings in the report. The blog also gives out lots of detail on different tools in the data visualization field.
http://apandre.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/data-visualization-platforms/

Data Visualization...

I am working on a project using SSAS to build out cubes. One of the requirements as part of the project is generate dynamic reports. One of the tools which i have come across is Tableau software, here is the link for the software web site, http://www.tableausoftware.com/. There is free trial download available at this web site. The tool is very rich when it comes to data visualization and also the kind of reports that can be generated is very rich in terms of features. Please read the following link for details http://www.tableausoftware.com/about