When you look at building an enterprise Big Data Analytics architecture, the direction in which you lead in terms of design and technology choices should be driven top-down from business user requirements. The old axioms of BI & DW projects of the bad old days in the data warehouse world still hold true with today’s modern data architectures: your analytics solutions will only be a success if the business uses your solution to make better decisions.

As you piece together a pilot project, you will begin to see patterns emerge in the way that you collect, manage, transform and present the data for consumption. Forrester did a nice job of classifying these patterns in this paper called “Patterns in Big Data“. For the purposes of a short, simple blog post, I am going to focus on 1 pattern here: “Big Data Refinery” using a one of our Pentaho technology partners, HP Vertica, an MPP analytical database engine with columnar storage.

Two reasons for starting with that use case. First reason: the Forrester paper kindly references the product that I worked on as Technology Director for Razorfish called Fluent. You can read about it more at the Forrester link above or read one of my Slideshares on it here. Secondly, at the Big Data Techcon conferenence on April 1, 2014 in Boston, Pentaho will present demos and focus on this architecture with HP Vertica. So, seems like a good time to focus on Big Data Refineries as a Big Data Analytics data pattern for now.

Here is how Forrester describes Big Data Refinery:

The distributed hub is used as a data staging and extreme-scale data transformation platform, but long-term persistence and analytics is performed by a BI DMBS using SQL analytics

What this means is that you are going to use Hadoop as a landing zone for data and transformations, aggregations and data treatment while utilizing purpose-built platforms like Vertica for distributed schemas and marts with OLAP business analytics using a tool like Pentaho Analytics. The movement of data and transformations throughout this platform will need to be orchestrated with an enterprise-ready data integration like Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle) and because we are presenting analytics to the end user, the analytics tools must support scalable data marts with MDX OLAP capabilities.

This reference architecture can be built using Pentaho, HP Vertica and a Hadoop distribution like this one below. This is just an example of Pentaho Business Analytics working with HP Vertica to solve this particular pattern, but can be architected with a number of different MPP & SMP databases or Hadoop distributions as well.

 

PDI Kettle provides data orchestration at all layers in this architecture included visual MapReduce in-cluster at the granular Hadoop data layer as well as ETL with purpose-built bulk loaders for Vertica. Pentaho Analysis Services (Mondrian) provides the MDX interface and end-user reporting tools like Pentaho Analyzer and Pentaho Report Designer are the business decision tools in this stack.

So if you were to pilot this architecture using the HP Vertica VMart sample star schema data set, you would auto-model a semantic model using Pentaho’s Web-based Analytics tools to get base model like this using VMart Warehouse, Call Center and Sales marts:

Then open that model in Pentaho Schema Workbench to augment and customize it with additional hierarchies, customer calculations, security roles, etc.:

From there, you can build dashboards using this published model and present analytical sales report to your business from the VMart data warehouse in Vertica like this:

 

 

Much of this is classic Business Intelligence solution architecture. The takeaway I’d like you to have for Big Data Refinery is that you are focusing your efforts on providing a Big Data Analtytics strategy for your business that can refine granular data points stored in Hadoop into manageable, refined data marts through the power of a distributed MPP analytical engine like HP Vertica. An extension of this concept would enable secondary connections from the OLAP model or the end-user reporting tool to connect directly to the detail data stored in Hadoop through an interface like Hive to drill down into detail stored in-cluster.