On November 27th, the students of the new Master Program „Business Intelligence and Process Management“ visited the event “Big Data, Berlin”. Here, Berlin’s Big Data community meets, and startups, software vendors, consultants, and academics can network and discuss the latest trends. The event was located at the co-working space betahaus.

bigdataberlin_1_smallThere were two talks. The first was by Thomas Bestfleisch, solution engineer at EXERSOL, who explained their distributed columnar in-memory database EXASolution. According to their TPC benchmark it is the fastest analytical database and can also handle complex analytical SQL queries in big (i.e. 100 terabyte) databases. The web-analytics company Webtrekk as well as the e-commerce company Zalando, both located in Berlin, are using EXASolution.

The second talk was by Ronert Obst, data scientist at Pivotal Data Lab, which is a consultancy. Ronert presented an interesting prototype for analyzing on-board diagnostics (OBD) data of cars. With an inexpensive ODB dongle the ODB data was transmitted via Bluetooth to an app on a smartphone of the driver, which sends it then to a server via UMTS. Different data mining and visualization techniques are used for the ODB data. Examples were route prediction or fuel capacity estimation. The project was a showcase of the capabilities of Pivotal Data Lab, created between customer projects. After the talks there was ample time to talk with the other participants of the event.

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by Roland Müller