Datameer Shows New Visualizer for Interactive Exploration of Big Data

Datameer, which made its reputation as the first big data platform purpose-built for Hadoop batch processing, is expanding its horizons into new territory. The San Francisco-based company has released a new data visualizer so business analysts can be more interactive about exploring datasets of any size.

The company claims this new feature, called Visual Explorer, will improve the way analysts interact with big data workloads inside their data lakes. The new data visualizer, introduced Sept. 28 at the Strata Data Conference in New York City, opens Datameer’s core big-data platform to go beyond integration and preparation of big data for analyses by adding unconstrained interactive visual exploration of large datasets.

“In our customers (which includes banks, stock markets, governments and other demanding enterprises) we’re seeing a lot more complicated IT systems now, with a mixture of on-premises storage, Hadoop deployments, public and hybrid cloud, data lakes, data warehouses and so on,” CEO Christian Rodatus told eWEEK.

“We see ourselves as a data fabric with the pipelines that combine all these assets and use a Hadoop data lake as an execution platform that provides efficient datasets into the business community for effective use. Visual Explorer helps analysts use the data more effectively.”

Data engineers and business analysts don’t have to worry that they will have to learn yet another new tool in order to do their work. They can use the same familiar spreadsheet-like interface to work with their data; then, with one click, they can instantly generate a chart or graph that visually displays the desired dimensions of the entire underlying data set.

The charts and graphs are entirely dynamic, allowing users the freedom to point-and-click drill down, filter and aggregate on any attribute and in any direction, to get instant visual feedback from billions of rows, Rodatus said. This real-time visual interactivity at scale makes it easier for business analysts to prepare and refine massive analytic data sets according to their own needs.

With the addition of Visual Explorer to the Datameer platform, data engineers can continue to focus on ingestion, preparation, security, governance and democratization of big data pipelines, now with even greater flexibility, speed and scale. Business analysts can then extend the value of those data pipelines by further preparing, refining and enriching the datasets that matter to them within a familiar, instantly interactive visual paradigm, Rodatus said.

Once analysts are satisfied with their customizations, Datameer will convert those explorations into repeatable and reusable data pipelines with the click of a button, Rodatus said.