News

Platfora Enhances Big Data Visualization Engine

• By David Ramel
• June 29, 2015

A new data visualization engine highlights improvements to Platfora Inc.'s updated Big Data analytics platform.

The Platfora solution is unique, the company claims, as it's built natively on the Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark platforms. The newest edition of its "Big Data Discovery platform," Platfora 4.5, features the Aurora Visualization Engine, along with several enhancements in other areas.

The company decided that existing tools didn't meet its requirements for fast, smooth visualizations of big-scale, raw or unstructured data, so it built its own HTML5-compliant engine for Web-based interactivity.

In a company video, Eric, lead data visualization engineer, said, "So we built Aurora from the ground up because we need complete control over the user experience. We decided not to go the open source route because most of the options out there just don't really meet our needs and they're not as compelling as we'd like them to be. They also don't perform at the level that we need them to.

"So by creating it from scratch, we essentially have complete control over the user experience. Also we have complete control over the performance, the scalability, and we also have the ability to make it very extensible so we can add any kind of visualization type or new types of renderers."

The company claims the new Aurora engine boosts rendering performance by 10x, providing sub-second interactivity with even millions of "marks" displayed on a screen. That reportedly lets users explore data faster with drag-and-drop functionality.

"They can also interact with data on the fly, smoothly panning, zooming and selecting in real-time while optimizing cross-visualization capabilities to help identify relevant information in light of the starting context," the company said in a statement.

Along with Aurora, the company also introduced a new framework for its data acceleration layer called Lenses, which provides faster query results by leveraging intranode parallelism. The company promises a 10x boost in query performance, particularly for fine-grain analysis of stores containing billions of rows of data.

Platfora also touted richer dynamic segmentation functionality, providing new use cases in A/B testing, for example, with a "combined fields" feature.

Better sharing and security functionality was also announced with a new Namespace feature, which provides quick and easy sharing of software installations among business groups.

"This release features ... the company's third-generation visualization technology that allows vibrant Web-based interaction with the massive and interlinked datasets needed for cutting-edge use cases: multi-channel customer analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) pattern analysis and Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) cybersecurity analytics," the company said in a statement.