ReadWriteWeb

Pentaho Corporation today announced that it has made freely available under open source all the big data capabilities in its Kettle v4.3 release, and has moved the entire Pentaho Kettle project to the Apache License Version 2.0. This is the same open source license that Hadoop and others use. We have covered Pentaho before here.

This week two cloud-based services opened their doors. (Can a cloud open? Whatever.) One, myERP.com, purports to replace the likes of Quickbooks and Salesforce. The other, EazyBI.com, offers low cost analytics on a wide variety of metrics. Both are worthy of further study and are based on freemium models.

Earlier this month, Forrester's Boris Evelson gave his top ten predictions for business intelligence for the coming year. Some of them bear repeating, some bear further reaction and clarification. What is clear is that this space is poised to take off, with just the right mix of products and innovation.

A new IBM Cognos Mobile free app from IBM's Cognos division makes it easy to explore any type of data on the go with location-aware analytics. Called Cognos on the iPad , the Cincinnati Zoo has used it to give management instant access, and a single view of visitor and business information to drive new revenue and improve member visits. As a result of this analysis, the zoo has increased visitor in-park spending by 25 percent this year.

Cloud-based business services are becoming commodities. As such, applications, storage, bandwidth, and now even analysis are marketable items with fluctuating values, almost by the day. As enterprises' hybrid clouds extend their boundaries to encompass not only their native data centers but multiple public cloud providers, cost management becomes an everyday operational task.

"The way that things are being done is dramatically changing. How infrastructure is provisioned and managed -- how applications and frameworks and emerging deployment models are being developed and provisioned. You now have VMs moving dynamically across the environment, and entire services that are starting to move across service providers." This from Rob Smoot, VMware's director of product marketing for management tools, in an interview with RWW.

If you aren't ready to totally give up your Excel spreadsheet to manage your business-critical metrics, then BI vendor MicroStrategy has an interesting solution for you called Cloud Personal. Announced today as a free public beta, you can upload data to their cloud repository analyze it, and share insights with your colleagues.

This week Microsoft announced its intentions to bring Hadoop to SQL Server and Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW). PDW was introduced last year and brought centralized data warehousing capabilities to SQL Server.

"As a first step, we will soon release a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of two new Hadoop connectors - one for SQL Server and one for PDW," the SQL Server Team blog says.

It's hard to keep track of all the database-related terms you hear these days. What constitutes "big data"? What is NoSQL, and why are your developers so interested in it? And now "NewSQL"? Where do in-memory databases fit into all of this? In this series, we'll untangle the mess of terms and tell you what you need to know.

In Part One we covered data, big data, databases, relational databases and other foundational issues. In this section we'll talk about data warehouses, ACID compliance, distributed databases and more. In part three, we'll cover non-relational databases, NoSQL and related concepts.

This week Pentaho rolled out an update for Pentaho 4 that expands its open core business intelligence platform's native support for big data sources. Pentaho now supports Apache Hadoop, HPCC Systems, EMC Greenplum, HP Vertica, IBM Netezza, MongoDB and more.

The iPad isn't just a hot new consumer device, it's also an increasingly popular tool for business. Each week we take a look at the new or updated business apps for the iPad, and highlight trends in how tablets are being used in the enterprise.

This week we look at the new Workday iPad app, and more.