Not long ago, the ability to create smart data visualizations (or dataviz) was a nice-to-have skill for design- and data-minded managers. But now it’s a must-have skill for all managers, because it’s often the only way to make sense of the work they do. Decision making increasingly relies on data, which arrives with such overwhelming velocity, and in such volume, that some level of abstraction is crucial. Thanks to the internet and a growing number of affordable tools, visualization is accessible for everyone—but that convenience can lead to charts that are merely adequate or even ineffective. By answering just two questions, Berinato writes, you can set yourself up to succeed: Is the information conceptual or data-driven? and Am I declaring something or exploring something?

Article that covers the following topics related to computing large datasets without the need to set up a distributed cluster:

• Why is RAM needed in the first place
• The easiest way to process data that doesn’t fit in memory: spending some money.
• The three basic software techniques for handling too much data: compression, chunking, and indexing.

Article that talks about the evolution of databases in high scale service architectures over the past 20 years