BI Revolution

Oracle Getting Its Social Endecca ON
I used Endeca's powerful faceted search in my last gig and these latest changes to their UI to allow easy drag and drop data visualization sound cool. Here is a note from their release:

Oracle New Endeca Release
The newly released Oracle Endeca Information Discovery 3.0 is the first major product update for the software since Oracle acquired Endeca in October 2011, Rodwick said. The Endeca software allows users to analyze unstructured data, or data that has not been captured in a database or data warehouse. 

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In addition to connectivity to additional data sources, the newly released Endeca software also comes with a new user interface. Users can now drag and drop visualizations to data source, allowing the software render a visual representation of the data in the chosen format. It can now also search and index material in 22 languages.

The Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite version 11.1.1.7 also expands the number of data sources it can work with. This is the first version of the suite to be able to draw data from a Hadoop cluster, through the Hive Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) connector.

Oracle BI “dashboards, reports and scorecards can source from Hadoop,” Rodwick said. “The Oracle BI Server generates a Hive query language, which initiates a Hadoop job. You can leave the data in Hadoop, rather than moving it into a database.”