The Senate Passes the DATA Act

The Digital Accountability and Transparency (DATA) act, which was introduced to the Senate last year, was unanimously passed on April 10th. The act is an overhaul of the previous information reporting system used by various government agencies, which was paper-based and not always easily accessible by the public. The DATA act sets government-wide standards for data reporting, and will require all agencies to publish information online at USASpending.gov. This fully searchable, public website will make government spending more transparent to everyone, and even offers visualization tools that display government spending trends.

Source: USASpending.gov

This bill still needs to be passed by the House of Representatives and signed by the President, but it is expected to be approved with no issues.

Once implemented, the website will become a resource for businesses, the government, and private citizens, as spending data will be freely available to download. As this article mentions, big data analytics can be used on these data sets to generate insights into government spending patterns. Opportunities for such uses are numerous, and could include ways to find and address waste in federal spending. Perhaps this could be the platform to react to the growing national debt problem.

Data Visualization From the U.S. Census Bureau

Data visualization tools are graphical and sometimes even interactive portrayals of data sets. Due to their ease of use and visual nature, demand for visualization tools is rising and are considered by many businesses to be an integral part of big data analysis. Last December, the Census Bureau released its own data visualization tool, the Census Explorer. This interactive online map shows various demographic information based on their data sets, including median household income, educational level, and home ownership rate.

A home ownership map of Washington D.C., based off of 2012 survey data (census.gov)

As this blog post from the Census Bureau points out, you can explore data at the state, county, and even the neighborhood level. You can also manipulate the data sets you are able to see to compare data across time periods, although the oldest data available is from 1990.

Oracle's NoSQL Opportunity

Oracle has long been known for its mySQL relational database management system (RDBMS). A recent trend in the world of database management is NoSQL (not only SQL), which is a database that can handle unstructured data. NoSQL also describes any database that does not use the relational model to store information. This article from Forbes mentions that Oracle is missing out on a huge opportunity with the growing popularity of NoSQL. It is important to note that Oracle does indeed have a NoSQL product, the Oracle NoSQL Database, but their market presence is limited compared to their competitors.

Oracle: 4% market share in 2012 (wikibon.org)

NoSQL is beginning to gain traction with enterprise customers, and the market is quickly growing. Most successful NoSQL projects like MongoDB are open source and have a limited reach to businesses. Oracle is a huge company and is already has an established presence is the business world. They have preexisting relationships with millions of traditional Oracle SQL users. If Oracle was to put more resources to developing a better NoSQL product, or even acquire a few startups that have a better product, then they are in a good position to gain market share and be at the forefront of the NoSQL trend.