According to Bill Cabiro citing Tableau software the answer is visual analysis:

[…] visual analysis is not a graphical depiction of data. Virtually any software application can produce a chart, gauge or dashboard. Visual analytics offers something much more profound. Visual analytics is the process of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces.

I’m not sure that a tool providing data visualization with investigative capabilities qualifies as a business intelligence solution. But I can agree it can be quite sexy for the C-level people.

Original title and link: What Is Business Intelligence 3.0? (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://blog.strat-wise.com/2011/08/04/what-is-bi-30.aspx

IT analytics company Splunk has received a patent for its method of organizing and presenting big data to mirror the experience of browsing links on the web. The patent validates Splunk’s unique approach to the problem of analyzing mountains of machine-generated data and hints at a future where writing big data applications doesn’t require a Ph.D.

So someone takes the philosophy of WWW and Semantic web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s linked open data star scheme, adds the BigData term and gets a patent? What’s next?

Original title and link: Splunk Wants to Webify Big Data (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

via: http://gigaom.com/cloud/splunk-wants-to-webify-big-data/

So you have lots of data, you’ve made some nice views on that data in CouchDB and want to visualise it. Sure you could use some server side scripts to take the CouchDB view out and make a plot, but that’s not cool these days.

Not very advanced, but still a nice CouchApp: ☞ live plots.

Original title and link: The Protovis CouchApp (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

via: http://simonmetson.posterous.com/plotting-with-couchdb-and-protovis