Curt A Monash

The meaning of the marketing buzzphrase "predictive analytics" is still mutating fairly rapidly. But in essence it's a replacement phrase for "data mining" and roughly equates to "applications of machine learning and/or statistical analysis to business decisions."

Two of IT's most consistent mandates are lower costs and more speed. To meet this demand for cheap speed, standard disk-based database management systems need help. Increasingly, this help is coming in the form of memory-centric data management technology.

Last year, I said there was a database management crisis; the relational model (practical or theoretically pure) wouldn't solve it, and alternative, more pragmatic ways of thinking about database management needed to be emphasized. I'll illustrate the point with several examples of situations in which the inability to access known information has cost large numbers of human lives.