Understanding the ad hoc analytics hype
If you are lucky, you may not be aware of the buzzword levels of hype surrounding ad hoc analytics. Fortunately, there are strong fundamentals behind the increasing level of interest and importance placed on having good tooling for ad hoc analytics. In a moment, we'll attempt to form a proper definition of ad hoc analytics, but not before we run a time travel query of our own to set the stage for what we now know as ad hoc analytics.
As a society, we've been collecting data since the advent of commerce. In the era before modern big data technologies, the business intelligence landscape was a very different place. Most data capture and entry was a manual affair, frequently driven by government accounting and auditing requirements. Particularly savvy companies were tracking their own, non-accounting-related Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), but these exercises were often short-lived and targeted at achieving specific outcomes. It...