The Future of Modern Analytics - Top Big Data Tools 2021
Today it is an extremely popular area that is constantly in need of new highly paid specialists. Data analysis is the process of validating, cleaning, transforming, and modeling data to obtain useful information, conclusions, and justifications for making decisions. Of course, such a process requires quality tools that can carry out thorough analysis quickly and efficiently. There are many different programs on the Internet, and it becomes difficult to choose the best one. We’ll show you the right solution and recommend some great options.
Excel
Used for basic calculations, working with tables and diagrams. Worth mentioning is a VBA add-in that helps you write macros to automate actions in Excel. Instead of Excel, you can use Google tables, Airtable, tables in Notion. The difference is in the interface, the number of functions, integration with online services.
Examples of tasks that Excel helps to solve:
- drawing up financial models and budgeting,
- analysis of the sales funnel or leads,
- collecting data and structuring information about customers and the market,
- sometimes – tracking tasks on a project, as a CRM for customer management or a questionnaire.
Power BI, Tableau, QlikView
BI solutions are needed for data analysis and visualization. The peculiarity of BI is the ability to create links with the database for automatic updating of tables and graphs.
BI is often used to create dashboards – pages that simultaneously contain several graphs and tables with key KPIs and important data. For example, financial indicators, sales funnel, recruitment data.
Miro or Visio
Miro (Realt = “11 useful tools for business analysis” imeBoard) and Visio are handy programs for creating diagrams, organizational charts, process descriptions. Visio is widely used because it is included in the Microsoft Office suite. Miro is flexible and fast online + it has functionality for interface prototyping. In Miro, most often they create diagrams with descriptions of processes, draw infographics, structure notes on the workflow.
Apache Hadoop
Apache Hadoop is an established tool for analyzing big data.
Avro
It was developed by Doug Cutting and is used to serialize data to encode Hadoop files.
Cassandra
An open-source distributed database system. It has been designed to handle massive amounts of distributed data across all standard servers, providing a highly reliable service. Cassandra belongs to a class of NoSQL systems that were created by Facebook. It is used by many organizations such as Netflix, Cisco, and Twitter.
Drill
An open-source distributed system designed for interactive analysis of large data sets. It is similar to Google’s Dremel and is owned by the Apache Foundation.
Elasticsearch
Open source search engine based on Apache Lucene. It is developed in Java and provides a scalable search that serves as the foundation for data discovery applications.
Flume
A framework for populating Hadoop data from web servers, application servers, and mobile devices. It is like plumbing between information sources and Hadoop.
HCatalog
Centralized metadata management system and file hosting Hadoop. HCatalog provides a single view of data across Hadoop clusters and provides a variety of tools, including Pig and Hive, to process any data item without having to know where the data is physically stored in the cluster.
Impala
A system for processing fast, interactive big data SQL queries that are stored in HDFS or HBase. Impala uses the same metadata, SQL syntax (Hive SQL), ODBC driver, and user interface (Hue Beeswax) as Apach Hive. The result is a familiar and unified platform for batch-oriented or real-time requests.
Json
Many of today’s NoSQL databases store data in JSON, which stands for JavaScript Object Notation. This format has become popular among web developers.
Kafka
A distributed message broker that offers a solution to manage and process all data streams on a consumer website. This type of data (number of views, queries, and other user actions) is a key component in modern social media.
MongoDB
A document-oriented NoSQL database developed according to the concept of open source. MongoDB provides full index support, flexible indexing of any item, and horizontal scalability without affecting functionality.
Neo4j
A graph database that boasts 1000 times or more performance improvements over a relational database.
Oozie
A business process management system that allows users to define a range of jobs written in different languages such as Map Reduce, Pig, and Hive. In the future, they will be logically linked to one another. Oozie allows users to install dependencies.
Pig
A Hadoop-based language developed by Yahoo. It is relatively easy to learn and very deep and very long data lines are possible with it.
Storm
Free open-source real-time distributed computing system. Storm makes it easy to handle streams of unstructured data in real-time. The storm is crash-resistant and works with almost all programming languages, although Java is commonly used. Storm originates from the Apache family but is now owned by Twitter.
Tableau
A data visualization tool that focuses primarily on data mining. You can create maps, histograms, scatter plots, and more without any programming skills. Recently, a web connector was released that allows you to connect to a database or API, thereby allowing a visual display of live data.
ZooKeeper
A data management service that provides centralized configuration and open source name registration for large distributed systems.
Conclusion
Information rules the world. To become a leader, a company needs to track data and be able to work with it correctly. If you plan to strengthen your position by identifying consumer preferences, market trends, effective business models, and prospects, then you should take a close look at advanced data analytics tools.
Do not overlook the statistics of your activity and underestimate their importance. It is also important to understand the traffic of your business data. By using one of the analytical tools presented above (or any other), you will receive a lot of new information and can significantly increase your chances of success. Therefore, to move in the right direction, do not forget about your data, analyze it, work with it and take into account the obtained result.
The correct selection of tools allows you to do your job more efficiently and progress as a specialist. Therefore, it is important to take a responsible approach to the analysis and make the right choice.