With the initial buzz surrounding unstructured settling down, the name of the game has become combining the new kinds of information pouring into the enterprise with traditional relational records for integrated analysis. That’s what Hewlett-Packard Co. faciliate to deliver with the latest version of its columnar database that debuted last week. 

The “Excavator” release of Vertica extends its structured query capabilities to unstructured data residing in Hadoop through a new access layer that HP claims can improve response times up to tenfold compared to before. Users are able to take advantage of that speed using pre-implemented functions for performing advanced operations like geospatial analysis that have been added in conjunction.

Yet as important as it may be for gaining a complete view of business, removing the technical barriers between an organization’s structured and unstructured information repositories is only one of the items on the analytics agenda. That need for integration also applies to the divide between the real-time and historical insights, which Google Inc. hopes to blur with the latest addition to its public cloud.

Cloud Dataflow hit general availability last week after a prolonged testing period with the promise of making it possible to carry out batch and stream processing at a fraction of the cost as alternatives like Hadoop. That’s achieved with a unified analytics language that allows developers to handle both workloads using the same straightforward commands.

And Google isn’t the only one to have realize the importance of simplicity to analytics. Storage array maker DataGravity Inc. also doubled down on ease-of-use in the new iteration of its storage stack that debuted against the backdrop of the search giant’s launch, which layers advanced data management functionality on top of the standard administrative features.

Customers can now group documents based on common properties such as sensitivity and enforce policies on that category to automatically regulate everything from backup schedules to user access. That can come handy both for large organizations with multiple departments sharing the same infrastructure and heavy-regulated institutions like hospitals that handle highly confidential data alongside everyday business records.

Photo via Geralt