Databricks, Spark and BDAS

Discussion of BDAS (Berkeley Data Analytics Systems), especially Spark and related projects, and also of Databricks, the company commercializing Spark.

November 19, 2015

CDH 5.5

I talked with Cloudera shortly ahead of today’s announcement of Cloudera 5.5. Much of what we talked about had something or other to do with SQL data management. Highlights include:

While I had Cloudera on the phone, I asked a few questions about Impala adoption, specifically focused on concurrency. There was mention of: Read more

October 15, 2015

Basho and Riak

Basho was on my (very short) blacklist of companies with whom I refuse to speak, because they have lied about the contents of previous conversations. But Tony Falco et al. are long gone from the company. So when Basho’s new management team reached out, I took the meeting.

For starters:

Basho’s product line has gotten a bit confusing, but as best I understand things the story is:

Technical notes on some of that include:  Read more

October 15, 2015

Couchbase 4.0 and related subjects

I last wrote about Couchbase in November, 2012, around the time of Couchbase 2.0. One of the many new features I mentioned then was secondary indexing. Ravi Mayuram just checked in to tell me about Couchbase 4.0. One of the important new features he mentioned was what I think he said was Couchbase’s “first version” of secondary indexing. Obviously, I’m confused.

Now that you’re duly warned, let me remind you of aspects of Couchbase timeline.

Technical notes on Couchbase 4.0 — and related riffs 🙂 — start: Read more

September 28, 2015

The potential significance of Cloudera Kudu

This is part of a three-post series on Kudu, a new data storage system from Cloudera.

Combined with Impala, Kudu is (among other things) an attempt to build a no-apologies analytic DBMS (DataBase Management System) into Hadoop. My reactions to that start:

I’ll expand on that last point. Analytics is no longer just about fast queries on raw or simply-aggregated data. Data transformation is getting ever more complex — that’s true in general, and it’s specifically true in the case of transformations that need to happen in human real time. Predictive models now often get rescored on every click. Sometimes, they even get retrained at short intervals. And while data reduction in the sense of “event extraction from high-volume streams” isn’t that a big deal yet in commercial apps featuring machine-generated data — if growth trends continue as much of us expect, it’s only a matter of time before that changes.

Of course, this is all a bullish argument for Spark (or Flink, if I’m wrong to dismiss its chances as a Spark competitor). But it also all requires strong low-latency analytic data underpinnings, and I suspect that several kinds of data subsystem will prosper. I expect Kudu-supported Hadoop/Spark to be a strong contender for that role, along with the best of the old-school analytic RDBMS, Tachyon-supported Spark, one or more contenders from the Hana/MemSQL crowd (i.e., memory-centric RDBMS that purport to be good at analytics and transactions alike), and of course also whatever Cloudera’s strongest competitor(s) choose to back.

September 28, 2015

Introduction to Cloudera Kudu

This is part of a three-post series on Kudu, a new data storage system from Cloudera.

Cloudera is introducing a new open source project, Kudu,* which from Cloudera’s standpoint is meant to eventually become the single best underpinning for analytics on the Hadoop stack. I’ve spent multiple hours discussing Kudu with Cloudera, mainly with Todd Lipcon. Any errors are of course entirely mine.

*Like the impala, the kudu is a kind of antelope. I knew that, because I enjoy word games. What I didn’t know — and which is germane to the naming choice — is that the kudu has stripes. 🙂

For starters:

Read more

September 14, 2015

DataStax and Cassandra update

MongoDB isn’t the only company I reached out to recently for an update. Another is DataStax. I chatted mainly with Patrick McFadin, somebody with whom I’ve had strong consulting relationships at a user and vendor both. But Rachel Pedreschi contributed the marvelous phrase “twinkling dashboard”.

It seems fair to say that in most cases:

Those generalities, in my opinion, make good technical sense. Even so, there are some edge cases or counterexamples, such as:

*And so a gas company is doing lightweight analysis on boiler temperatures, which it regards as hot data. 🙂

While most of the specifics are different, I’d say similar things about MongoDB, Cassandra, or any other NoSQL DBMS that comes to mind: Read more

August 24, 2015

Multi-model database managers

I’d say:

Before supporting my claims directly, let me note that this is one of those posts that grew out of a Twitter conversation. The first round went:

Merv Adrian: 2 kinds of multimodel from DBMS vendors: multi-model DBMSs and multimodel portfolios. The latter create more complexity, not less.

Me: “Owned by the same vendor” does not imply “well integrated”. Indeed, not a single example is coming to mind.

Merv: We are clearly in violent agreement on that one.

Around the same time I suggested that Intersystems Cache’ was the last significant object-oriented DBMS, only to get the pushback that they were “multi-model” as well. That led to some reasonable-sounding justification — although the buzzwords of course aren’t from me — namely: Read more

August 3, 2015

Data messes

A lot of what I hear and talk about boils down to “data is a mess”. Below is a very partial list of examples.

To a first approximation, one would expect operational data to be rather clean. After all, it drives and/or records business transactions. So if something goes awry, the result can be lost money, disappointed customers, or worse, and those are outcomes to be strenuously avoided. Up to a point, that’s indeed true, at least at businesses large enough to be properly automated. (Unlike, for example — 🙂 — mine.)

Even so, operational data has some canonical problems. First, it could be inaccurate; somebody can just misspell or otherwise botch an entry. Further, there are multiple ways data can be unreachable, typically because it’s:

Inconsistency can take multiple forms, including:  Read more

July 7, 2015

Zoomdata and the Vs

Let’s start with some terminology biases:

So when my clients at Zoomdata told me that they’re in the business of providing “the fastest visual analytics for big data”, I understood their choice, but rolled my eyes anyway. And then I immediately started to check how their strategy actually plays against the “big data” Vs.

It turns out that:

*The HDFS/S3 aspect seems to be a major part of Zoomdata’s current story.

Core aspects of Zoomdata’s technical strategy include:  Read more

June 10, 2015

Hadoop generalities

Occasionally I talk with an astute reporter — there are still a few left 🙂 — and get led toward angles I hadn’t considered before, or at least hadn’t written up. A blog post may then ensue. This is one such post.

There is a group of questions going around that includes:

To a first approximation, my responses are:  Read more

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