It’s almost time for that final drive home of the week, and what a week it has been with a few new releases, a summit, and a little bit of technical fun. Here’s what happened:

New Sandbox Release. Yes, your favorite Hadoop VM image just got even better. Cheryle took us through the new features which included Ambari integration and Russell followed up with a quick tour of Ambari. There’s still plenty of time to download Sandbox for a weekend of data crunching fun.

HDP 2.0 Alpha 2 was released. This preview release demonstrates some of the performance improvements in store for the final HDP 2.0 release via YARN, enhancements to Hive per the Stinger Initiative, and Apache Tez. Just before the release, we posted some early test results which showed a 45X (yes, that’s forty five) performance improvement for Hive interactive queries. But that’s just the beginning as we push to 100X, and Microsoft also talked about their contributions to the Stinger Initiative with the same aim in mind.

If you’ve downloaded Sandbox and are looking for some inspiration for a little fun, then Russell also posted a two part series on extracting, loading, querying and analyzing your own Twitter archive with Hive. Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here.

And finally, there was just the small matter of the Hadoop Summit in Amsterdam. We had a great time and hope you did too. Thank you for attending, contributing to the conversation and supporting Hadoop. If you’re now really excited to learn Hadoop, we posted about available training we have in Europe and Palo Alto.

And that was the week that was. Has your Sandbox downloaded yet?

We are excited to tell you about the newest release of the Hortonworks Sandbox.

The Hortonworks Sandbox provides the fastest onramp to Apache Hadoop with an easy-to-use, integrated learning environment and a functional personal Hadoop environment. The Sandbox takes the complexity out of Hadoop installation and set up by providing a fully functional virtual image. If you are evaluating Apache Hadoop or need an easy way to prove out use cases then the Sandbox is for you. With the Sandbox, you don’t have to go through the work required to set up Hadoop cluster or to configure Hadoop. Simply download the virtual machine.  Zero to Big Data in 15 minutes!

Here are the key enhancements available now:

Apache Hadoop Essentials Classroom Material

Are you new to Hadoop and need the answer to “What is Apache Hadoop?” Then the Hadoop Essentials material is for you. It’s designed to help a non-technical user understand what all the hype is around Hadoop and Big Data. And, we give you some easy hands-on labs to use.

We have taken our one-day Hadoop Essentials course and included the lecture content and hands-on labs in the Sandbox. The newly released lecture material goes into depth on the use cases of Apache Hive, Apache Pig, and Apache HCatalog. When you download the newest version of the Sandbox, the lecture material will be included in the download. You’ll have everything you need to learn Hadoop on a train, plane or automobile, even if you don’t have an Internet connection. If you use the existing Sandbox, simply update the tutorials, and then you will be able to link out to the video content.

Apache Ambari

We have integrated Apache Ambari into this new release of Sandbox.  Apache Ambari provides a 100-percent open source and intuitive set of tools to monitor, manage and efficiently provision your Apache Hadoop cluster. Ambari simplifies the operation of Hadoop clusters into a single, cohesive data platform. There are additional memory requirements for the Sandbox with Ambari and so enabling Ambari is optional. There’s some simple set up required to enable it – you’ll find those instructions in the Sandbox.

Easy navigation into the Hortonworks Sandbox. Start with tutorials or jump straight into your personal Hadoop environment.

Sandbox Users Doing Cool Things

The Sandbox Forums are where you can find assistance with the Sandbox. You will also find users who are doing some interesting things with the Sandbox.

• Getting Talend Big Data Studio up and running with Sandbox
• How about using R with the Sandbox
• Use Tableu’s cool analytics on the Sandbox
• Log in as Root and get busy with the command line?

Ready to dive into Ambari and the new videos? Download now! We will continue to deliver interesting tutorials for you and Sandbox enhancements.