Swimming In The Data River, Or, When “Streaming Analytics” Isn’t (Gian Merlino)

This month, we're back at Overstock with a HEAVY hitter in the streaming analytics space. Gian Merlino (CTO of Imply) joins us to discuss the data river and the state of streaming analytics.

The talk

The dirty secret of most “streaming analytics” technologies is that they are just stream processors: they sit on a stream and continuously compute the results of a particular query. They’re good for alerting, keeping a dashboard up-to-date in real time, and streaming ETL, but they’re not good at powering apps that give you true insight into what is happening: for this you need the ability to explore, slice/dice, drill down, and search into the data. This talk will cover the current state of the streaming analytics world and what Apache Druid, a real-time analytical database, brings to the table.

Gian will also dive into a live demo with Apache Druid, starting with the fundamentals of Druid before taking a deep dive into its inner workings. We will use Druid and the Imply Pivot data visualization UI, which is optimized for streaming analytics with Druid, to explore data at scale in several use case examples.

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About the speaker

Gian Merlino is a cofounder and CTO of Imply, a San Francisco based technology company. Gian is also one of the main committers of Druid. Previously, Gian led the data ingestion team at Metamarkets and held senior engineering positions at Yahoo. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Caltech.