From Reports to Predictive Analytics

Predicting the future is the actual point of collecting all this data. Back in the 80s,

companies were obsessed with static SQL reports that just told them what already happened.

It was basically looking in the rearview mirror. Then we got Data Warehouses and Business

Intelligence, which cleaned things up, but it was still just describing

the past. The game changed when we hit the Big Data era with tools like Hadoop

and Spark. Now, we take messy, massive data from everywhere and use

machine learning to actually guess what comes next. You stop analyzing history and start

engineering the future.