Put together one of the most impressive visualization tools, Tableau Software, with one of the best solutions for big data, Hadoop, and you’ll probably get some astonishing results.

Credit Cloudera.

While Tableau Software works with structured data only, with this connector it gets access to Hive through HiveQL.

Original title and link: Visualizing Hadoop data with Tableau Software and Cloudera Connector for Tableau (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2012/02/cloudera-connector-for-tableau-has-been-released/

Starting today customers can view graphs of 23 job flow metrics within the EMR Console by selecting the Monitoring tab in the Job Flow Details page. These metrics are pushed CloudWatch every five minutes at no cost to you and include information on:

• Job flow progress including metrics on the number of map and reduce tasks running and remaining in your job flow and the number of bytes read and written to S3 and HDFS.
• Job flow contention including metrics on HDFS utilization, map and reduce slots open, jobs running, and the ratio between map tasks remaining and map slots.
• Job flow health including metrics on whether your job flow is idle, if there are missing data blocks, and if there are any dead nodes.

That’s like free pr0n for operations teams.

On a different note, I’ve noticed that the Hadoop stack (Hadoop, Hive, Pig) on Amazon Elastic MapReduce is based on second to last versions, which says that extensive testing is performed on Amazon side before rolling new versions out:

• Hadoop: 0.20.205 precursor of Hadoop 1.0.0 supports append and security, but doesn’t have RAID, symlinks or MR2
• Hive: 0.7.1 (precursor of latest 0.8.0)
• Pig: 0.9.1 (precursor of latest 0.9.2)

Original title and link: Amazon Elastic MapReduce New Features: Metrics, Updates, VPC, and Cluster Compute Support (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/01/new-elastic-mapreduce-features-metrics-updates-vpc-and-cluster-compute-support-guest-post.html

I don’t know how I ended up becoming the head of our local community association. Anyhow, I’m now responsible for laying out next year’s budget. Most of our expenses seem to be fixed from one year to another, but then there’s the expense for the snow removal service. This year, no snow. Last year, most snow on record in 30 years! How do you budget for something as volatile as snow? I need more data!

Instead of just googling the answer, we’re going to fetch some raw data and feed it into Hadoop Hive.

Hadoop FTW!

Original title and link: Powered by Hadoop and Hive: Budgeting for snow removal in your local community (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://magnusljadas.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/search-for-snow-with-hadoop-hive/

A very practical example of how Hive and Hadoop could deliver value when applied to clickstreams, the most common data for each web property:

Hadoop, Hive, and related tech­nologies are formi­dable tools for unlocking value from data. […] Retention measure­ments are partic­u­larly signif­icant because they paint a detailed picture about the overall stick­iness of a product across the entire userbase.

The same clickstream data can be used to calculate visitors’ conversion with the Bayesian discriminant using Hadoop.

Original title and link: Measuring User Retention With Hadoop and Hive (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://blog.polarmobile.com/2012/01/measuring-user-retention-with-hadoop-and-hive/

Jaikumar Vijayan (Computerworld) interviews Doug Cutting:

Q: How would you describe Hadoop to a CIO or a CFO? Why should enterprises care about it?

A: At a really simple level, it lets you affordably save and process vastly more data than you could before. With more data and the ability to process it, companies can see more, they can learn more, they can do more. [With Hadoop] you can start to do all sorts of analyses that just weren’t practical before. You can start to look at patterns over years, over seasons, across demographics. You have enough data to fill in patterns and make predictions and decide, “How should we price things?” and “What should we be selling now?” and “How should we advertise?” It is not only about having data for longer periods, but also richer data about any given period.

The interview covers topics like why the interest in Hadoop, Hadoop adoption in the enterprise world and outside, limitations of relational database. It is a must read—if only they would have added some newlines here and there.

Original title and link: Doug Cutting About Hadoop, Its Adoption and Future, and Its Relationship With Relational Databases (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222758/The_Grill_Doug_Cutting

Java, Cascading, Pipes - C++, Hive, Pig, Rhipe, Dumbo, Cascalog… which one of these should you use for writing Map Reduce code?

Antonio Piccolboni takes them up for a test:

At the end of this by necessity incomplete and unscientific language and library comparison, there is a winner and there isn’t. There isn’t because language comparison is always multidimensional and subjective but also because the intended applications are very different. On the other hand, looking for a general purpose, moderately elegant, not necessarily most efficient, not necessarily mature language for exploration purposes, Rhipe seems to fit the bill pretty nicely.

Original title and link: Looking for a Map Reduce Language (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://blog.piccolboni.info/2011/04/looking-for-map-reduce-language.html

The architecture for offline processing biodiversity based on Sqoop, Hadoop, Oozie, and Hive:

And its future:

Following this processing work, we expect to modify our crawling to harvest directly into HBase. The flexibility HBase offers will allow us to grow incrementally the richness of the terms indexed in the Portal, while integrating nicely into Hadoop based workflows. The addition of coprocessors to HBase is of particular interest to further reduce the latency involved in processing, by eliminating batch processing altogether.

Many companies working with large datasets have to deal with multiple systems and duplicate data between the online services and offline processors. While the infrastructure costs are going down, the costs of complexity are not. The HBase + Hadoop and Cassandra + Brisk combos are starting to address this problem.

Original title and link: Biodiversity Indexing: Offline Processing With Hadoop, Hive, Sqoop, Oozie (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2011/06/biodiversity-indexing-migration-from-mysql-to-hadoop/

Remember when everyone was suggesting solutions for Twitter architecture? Now the Library of Congress is trying to figure out what technologies to use to store the Twitter archive:

The project is still very much under construction, and the team is weighing a number of different open source technologies in order to build out the storage, management and querying of the Twitter archive. While the decision hasn’t been made yet on which tools to use, the library is testing the following in various combinations: Hive, ElasticSearch, Pig, Elephant-bird, HBase, and Hadoop.

Note that in terms of storage only HBase is mentioned—Twitter’s main tweet storage is MySQL though.

Original title and link: Choosing Technologies: The Library of Congress and the Twitter Archive (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://blogs.forbes.com/oreillymedia/2011/06/13/the-library-of-congress-twitter-archive-one-year-later/

If you don’t count the download, you’ll get this up and running in 5 minutes tops. At the end you’ll have Hadoop, Sqoop, Pig, Hive, HBase, ZooKeeper, Oozie, Hume, Flume, and Whirr all configured and ready to experiment with.

Making it easy for users to experiment with these tools increases the chances for adoption. Adoption means business.

Original title and link: Experimenting with Hadoop using Cloudera VirtualBox Demo (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

via: http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2011/06/cloudera-distribution-including-apache-hadoop-3-demo-vm-installation-on-mac-os-x-using-virtualbox-cdh/