Innovative Analytics

8/18/2019 Innovative Analytics

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Innovative AnalyticsUncover actionable insights and new opportunities with the

Teradata® Aster Discovery Platform.

by Brett Martin

The Teradata® Aster Discovery Platform offers new features and capabilities to deliver

powerful business insights. The integrated platform for big data analytics is composed

of the Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance and the Teradata Aster Database, which

are optimized to utilize all data and multiple analytics. To find out more about how the solution

applies next-generation analytics, Teradata Magazine spoke with Awny Al-Omari, Engineering

Fellow at Teradata Labs.

How does the TeradataAster Discovery Platform

overcome the challenge of

driving value from big data?

Al-Omari: The discovery process

involves the steps of data acquisition,

data transformation, application of

various analytics and results visualiza-

tion. The Teradata Aster Discovery

Platform allows the user to perform all

of these steps in an explorative, itera-

tive manner. The key is the integration

of diverse data sources and execution

engines under one platform, and using

a single unified language.

By integrating the discovery process

components, the platform significantly

reduces the data preparation efforts

and bridges the skills gap required for

the various stages and types of analyt-ics. The solution is faster, simpler and

offers the most comprehensive discov-

ery process with a single platform than

any other solution.

What are some of the

discovery components that

enable the analytics?

Al-Omari: The Teradata Aster SNAP

Framework ™ allows for discovery

operations using SQL for relational,

SQL-MapReduce™ [SQL-MR ™] for

general, SQL-GR ™ for graph and R

for statistical analytics. The data can

reside locally in Teradata Aster tables

for structured data or the distributed

file system for unstructured data. The

information can also reside on an

external Teradata Database or ApaHadoop® system and be accessed v

Teradata QueryGrid™ connectors.

The discovery results can be

reported and visualized via the

Teradata Aster AppCenter™ or inte

grated with third-party BI tools. T

analytics can be performed and lev

aged by a wide spectrum of enterp

users ranging from developers and

data scientists to business users.

What is the Teradata Aste

AppCenter and how are y

customers using it?

Al-Omari: The AppCenter is a

framework that enables the buildin

deployment and sharing of analyti

apps and the visualization of result

ASK THE EXPERTS

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Analysts and business users can

leverage the apps to analyze data and

discover insights that they can share

across the organization. The results are

also materialized in tables in the data-

base and ready for operationalization.

The AppCenter portal provides

the ability to parameterize, schedule

and run the apps, and see the results

using one of the various built-in

visualization charts. The solution

comes with ready-to-use apps such as

the affinity analyzer, pattern finder,

recommendation generator, email

parser and cross validation. With the

AppCenter, analytics are open to all

potential consumers in the enterprise

so more users can benefit.

Can you describe some of

the new problem-solving

abilities that the platform

offers to the broader group

of users?

Al-Omari: Organizations can

use more than 100 built-in analytic

functions or build their own busin

specific functions using the open

application programming interfac

The platform can be used for colla

orative filtering, clustering and reg

sion to optimize business operatio

Or the advanced path analytics can

be used to maximize ROI, minimiz

churn or detect anomalies and frau

patterns. These are just a few exam

Best of all is the combination of

different analytics methods, which

delivers a higher value than the sum

THREE THINGS YOU

DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT

AWNY AL-OMARI

{ 1 }

As an avid outdoorsman and

hunter, he is skilled enough

with his air gun to hit a

penny from the length of a

soccer field.

{ 2 }Inspired by Elzéard Bouffier

(The Man Who Planted

Trees), Al-Omari’s goal

is to plant at least 1,000

trees himself.

{ 3 }

He has a passion for

ancient poetry. As a child,

he memorized more than

20,000 lines.



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ASK THE EXPERTS

the parts. For example, businesses can

use the sentiment analysis SQL-MR

function combined with SQL-GR

centrality to find satisfied customers

who influence their networks. The

various analytics methods are joined

together under one platform without

the need for resource-consuming datapreparation between different analyt-

ics execution engines.

The platform includes the

Teradata Aster Big Analytics

Appliance 4. What makes

it unique?

Al-Omari: The appliance is a com-

plete, pre-configured and optimized

discovery platform specially designed

for big data analytics. It allows cus-

tomers to mix and match a wide rangeof analytics by combining MapReduce,

Graph, R and SQL engines with an

optional, ready-to-run Hadoop data

lake for big data storage and prepara-

tion. The appliance makes big data

problems manageable and offers busi-

ness insights by being able to run any

analytic on any data.

What’s new in Teradata

Aster Database 6.10?

Al-Omari: The focus is on enterprise

readiness and operational simplic-

ity. As analysts and data scientists are

enabled to deploy and share their

discovery apps with a wider domain

of business users, Teradata Aster 6.10

offers hardened security and a more

robust system under various workload

operations. Moreover, the time to

perform a system expansion has been

reduced significantly, and the software

upgrade process has been improved.

Teradata Aster 6.10 also continues

to strengthen Teradata Unified DataArchitecture™ features with improve-

ments in connectors, enhanced

integration with Teradata Viewpoint

and support for new Teradata Studio

features. Plus, with the introduction

of R client integration, users can now

leverage massive parallel processing to

push popular R functions for scalable

parallel execution, use Teradata Aster

analytics functions and access tables as

R data frames.

The platform enables

connection analytics. What

is it and why is it important?

Al-Omari: Most analytics algo-

rithms drive insights by analyzing

attributes related to individual entities

and aggregates over sets of entities

Connection analytics, by contrast,

looks deeper into the relationship

between entities and searches for

insights based on networks. Notio

such as paths, clusters, connectors,

bridges and influencers are essenticonnection analytics, which looks

how relationships influence outcom

in networks of people, processes

and products.

The Teradata Aster Discovery

Platform enables connection

analytics via its SQL-GR engine

and a growing set of built-in graph

analytics functions. Functions like

PageRank and Centrality are used

find top influencer nodes in the gr

Other functions like Closeness and

AllPairShortestPath find the shorte

paths between nodes and can be us

for optimizing business operations

Brett Martin is the editor-in-chief fo

Teradata Magazine.

INTEGRATE WITH A DATA WAREHOUSE

“The Teradata® Aster Discovery Platform is designed for data scienti

and business analysts to discover new insights with innovative analy

More and more customers now want to deploy analytics results such

customer scores or sentiment values uncovered through the discove

process back into the production data warehouse. To achieve this, th

discovery platform must meet the requirements for the production

environment, including security, workload management and userscalability. The platform satisfies those requirements.”

—Awny Al-Omari, Engineering Fellow at Teradata L


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