Understanding Analytical Databases

Interesting piece by Wayne Eckerson.  Linking to an upcoming talk.   How to get data to advanced analytical methods effectively?  The world has changed from the relational database of the near past:  " .... Today, these so-called analytical databases, or analytical platforms, span a range of technology from appliances and columnar databases to shared nothing, massively parallel processing databases, with unique extensions which in some cases include a MapReduce processing framework for advanced analytics. The common thread among them is that most are read-only environments that deliver exceptional price/performance compared with general-purpose relational databases originally designed to run transaction processing applications. ... "