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Introduction

In my numerical modeling career (1980’s-2000’s), the use of large data files was routine. When building large simulation models, the input and output files were in the size range of hundreds of millions (100M) to billions (1B+) of lines. The use and processing of these were fairly straight-forward compared to what I am going to show in this series.

In my business analytics career, it was about six years ago when my data files started climbing in to 1B+ record range. Now, almost all of my data files are in the range of 100M+ to 1B+ records.

Working with this much data requires computational speed, flexibility, and the ability to visualize a huge amount of information. Without these attributes, it is very hard to comprehend the insights that are stored in the data in a reasonable amount of time.

Speed and flexibility. Those are key words that need to be understood. Hopefully this article series will show how Alteryx and Tableau allow users to achieve tremendous insights when analyzing their big data sources.

Now click on Page 2 to read more of the story!