I attended Kx’s latest meetup in New York this Monday at J.P. Morgan. This meetup was different. It was focused on using kdb+ for data analysis in pharmaceutical industry. I have barely any knowledge about how pharma companies work and what type/size of data they deal with. This meetup was an incredible introduction to growing need of powerful analytical tools in the pharmaceutical industry.
The event started with a quick introduction by Kx’s new CEO Mark Sykes. I don’t know much about him but he seemed like a nice humble guy. He also announced KxCon that will be held in 2016 in Montauk, New York. Mark led the way for Larry Pickett, CIO of Purdue Pharma, to discuss Purdue’s big data strategy. This was quite high level and am not sure how many people found it interesting. I saw many attendees on their phones during this presentation. I, however, was quite interested in seeing how pharmaceutical companies think differently than financial firms when it comes to big data.
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Sayee Natarajan, Director of Systems Development at Purdue Pharma, was the next presenter and he focused on how pharmaceutical companies are capturing and storing way more data now than they ever did in the past. For example, these companies are now using smart watches to capture health/fitness data in real-time. This is real-time data just like market data which needs to be stored and analyzed later.
Next talk was by Ed Bierly who is part of Data Science group at Purdue. He delved more into how Purdue is beginning to use Kdb+ but didn’t go into too much detail. That was done by Nataraj Dasgupta who works with Ed. Nataraj’s talk was probably of most interest to the geeky audience. He highlighted some solutions that they had considered such as hadoop/python/SAS for data warehousing and analytics but complained that you needed different technology to store the data, analyze the data and then, finally, visualize it. kdb+ with the help of websockets can do all of this together and in much less time. It also requires less maintenance than hadoop. Nataraj showed several examples where other technolgy such as R were taking 30-40 minutes to analyze some data whereas kdb+ only took few seconds! He also showed web based framework that Purdue had developer internally which was using kdb+ as backend to analyze data and then using javascript and other web technology to visualize the data for management.
After the talk, we all headed to a nearby wine bar for some (free) drinks. Obviously, this was the best part 🙂 Two copies of Jeffry Borror’s q for Mortals 3 were given away in a drawing. I, sadly, didn’t win. Guys, if you would like me to review this book or q-tips, feel free to send me a free copy!
Overall, it was great to see kdb+ being utilized by an industry other than finance. You don’t get to hear much about how these pharmaceutical companies use IT to advance/support their businesses. In future, I would be interested in learning about how energy companies are using kdb+.