Big data analytics startup Metanautix has been making some heads turn with its flagship product, the Metanautix Quest Data Compute Engine. The product, launched last year at the Tableau Conference, promises to simplify data supply chain, essentially by representing disparate data of any type as relational tables within Quest, compatible with SQL queries.
“Re-imagining SQL for a big data world is one of the key tenets of Quest. We think of SQL as “the assembly language of data” – i.e., the lowest level language that business analysts understand,” founder & CEO at Metanautix had written last year. “The declarative nature of the language (say what to do, not how to do it) makes it attractive to business users but also makes it amenable to automatic optimization and scheduling.”
The startup’s efforts with data agnosticism goes even further as Quest promises to provide good results with visual data being turned into SQL tables.
Images are stored in a variety of formats, but Quest can represents them as relational tablesin the form of color values (r,g,b), a pixel location (x,y), and an image id. However, Quest might store images internally in an optimized format, even as they are shown to users as tables of pixels, explains Larry Cutler of Metanautix in a blog post.
Experts however remain slightly unsure as to how this could work with videos, mapping which would be of a far larger scale as compared to images. Christopher Tozzi of The VAR Guy aptly points out: “Metanautix is doing interesting things by pushing data agnosticism to the next level. Moving forward, the big data conversation likely will become not about how to make different data analytics and storage tools compatible with each other, but how to make analytics strategies work with any type of data.”
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(Image credit: Metanautix)
