In Derrick Harris’ article on GigaOM entitled “EMC to Hadoop competition: See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.”, EMC unveiled their new Pivotal HD offering which effectively re-architects the Greenplum analytic database so it sits on top of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Scott Yara, Greenplum cofounder, is excited about the new product. Since a key focus for us at Hortonworks is to deeply integrate Hadoop with other data systems (a la our efforts with Teradata, Microsoft, MarkLogic, and others), I’m always excited to see data system providers like Greenplum decide to store their data natively in HDFS. And I can’t argue with Scott Yara’s sentiment that “I do think the center of gravity will move toward HDFS”.

But putting HDFS under a proprietary database does not make it Hadoop, however.

All in on Hadoop?

Glancing at the Pivotal HD diagram in the GigaOM article, they’ve made it easy to distinguish the EMC proprietary components in Blue from the Apache Hadoop-related components in Green.…

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Apache Pig version 0.11 was released last week. An Apache Pig blog post summarized the release. New features include:

• A DateTime datatype, documentation here.
• A RANK function, documentation here.
• A CUBE operator, documentation here.
• Groovy UDFs, documentation here.

And many improvements. Oink it up for Pig 0.11! Hortonworks’ Daniel Dai gave a talk on Pig 0.11 at Strata NY, check it out:…

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Last week, the HBase community released 0.94.5, which is the most stable release of HBase so far. The release includes 76 jira issues resolved, with 61 bug fixes, 8 improvements, and 2 new features.

Most of the bug fixes went against the REST server, replication, region assignment, secure client, flaky unit tests, 0.92 compatibility and various stability improvements. Some of the interesting patches in this release are:
[HBASE-3996] – Support multiple tables and scanners as input to the mapper in map/reduce jobs
[HBASE-5416] – Improve performance of scans with some kind of filters.
[HBASE-7757] – Add web UI to REST server and Thrift server
[HBASE-7748] – Add DelimitedKeyPrefixRegionSplitPolicy
[HBASE-6669] – Add BigDecimalColumnInterpreter for doing aggregations using AggregationClient
[HBASE-7728] – Deadlock occurs between hlog roller and blog syncer’

The release candidate has been extensively tested by Hortonworks and many others in the community.…

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We are now less than a month away from the kickoff of Hadoop Summit Europe, taking place March 20-21 in Amsterdam. The excitement from the community is really starting to grow and pass sales are far ahead of where we expected. Much of the buzz is tied directly to the content that will be presented during the conference.

In all, there were be 42 breakout sessions with presenters from more than 20 companies, including representatives from Adobe, eBay, Facebook, HSBC, LinkedIn, Twitter and Yahoo!. We have started to feature interviews with some of the most compelling speakers on the Hadoop Summit website. Those posted thus far include:

• Clemens Neudecker of the National Library of the Netherlands and Sven Schlarb of the Austrian National Library (interview)
• Alasdair Anderson of HSBC (interview)
• Mikhail Petrenko of Adobe (interview)
• Jason Dai of Intel (interview)
• Steve Watt of Red Hat (interview)
• Joydeep Sen Sarma of Qubole (interview)

The breakout sessions are broken down into four tracks, each aimed at providing valuable and educational content to meet the varied needs of the attendees.…

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YARN is part of the next generation Hadoop cluster compute environment. It creates a generic and flexible resource management framework to administer the compute resources in a Hadoop cluster. The YARN application framework allows multiple applications to negotiate resources for themselves and perform their application specific computations on a shared cluster. Thus, resource allocation lies at the heart of YARN.

YARN ultimately opens up Hadoop to additional compute frameworks, like Tez, so that an application can optimize compute for their specific requirements.

The YARN Resource Manager service is the central controlling authority for resource management and makes allocation decisions. It exposes a Scheduler API that is specifically designed to negotiate resources and not schedule tasks. Applications can request resources at different layers of the cluster topology such as nodes, racks etc. The scheduler determines how much and where to allocate based on resource availability and the configured sharing policy.…

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Last week, we outlined our approach for delivering an enterprise viable Apache Hadoop distribution in the open.  Simply put: we believe the fastest way to innovate is to do our work within the open source community, introduce enterprise feature requirements into that public domain, and to work diligently to progress existing open source projects and incubate new projects to meet those needs.

In support of our approach, this week we’ve announced the submission of two new incubation projects to the Apache Software foundation together with the launch of the “Stinger Initiative”, all aimed at enhancing the security and performance of Hadoop applications.  These efforts focus on enterprise requirements that are essential to enable broad adoption across the Hadoop ecosystem.

• The Stinger initiative aims to dramatically speed up Apache Hive in support of interactive query use cases.
• The Knox Gateway addresses the need for a single point of authentication and secure access for Apache Hadoop services in a cluster.

…

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MapReduce has served us well.  For years it has been THE processing engine for Hadoop and has been the backbone upon which a huge amount of value has been created.  While it is here to stay, new paradigms are also needed in order to enable Hadoop to serve an even greater number of usage patterns.  A key and emerging example is the need for interactive query, which today is challenged by the batch-oriented nature of MapReduce.  A key step to enabling this new world was Apache YARN and today the community proposes the next step… Tez

What is Tez?

Tez – Hindi for “speed” – (currently under incubation vote within Apache) provides a general-purpose, highly customizable framework that creates simplifies data-processing tasks across both small scale (low-latency) and large-scale (high throughput) workloads in Hadoop. It generalizes the MapReduce paradigm to a more powerful framework by providing the ability to execute a complex DAG (directed acyclic graph) of tasks for a single job so that projects in the Apache Hadoop ecosystem such as Apache Hive, Apache Pig and Cascading can meet requirements for human-interactive response times and extreme throughput at petabyte scale (clearly MapReduce has been a key driver in achieving this).…

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Introduced by Facebook in 2007, Apache Hive and its HiveQL interface has become the de facto SQL interface for Hadoop.  Today, companies of all types and sizes use Hive to access Hadoop data in a familiar way and to extend value to their organization or customers either directly or though a broad ecosystem of existing BI tools that rely on this key proven interface.  The who’s who of business analytics have already adopted Hive.

Apache Hive was originally built for large-scale operational batch processing and it is very effective with reporting, data mining and data preparation use cases.  These usage patterns remain very important but with widespread adoption of Hadoop, the enterprise requirement for Hadoop to become more real time or interactive has increased in importance as well. At Hortonworks, we believe in the power of the open source community to innovate faster than any proprietary offering and the Stinger initiative is proof of this once again as we collaborate with others to improve Hive performance.…

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Back in the day, in order to secure a Hadoop cluster all you needed was a firewall that restricted network access to only authorized users. This eventually evolved into a more robust security layer in Hadoop… a layer that could augment firewall access with strong authentication. Enter Kerberos.  Around 2008, Owen O’Malley and a team of committers led this first foray into security and today, Kerberos is still the primary way to secure a Hadoop cluster.

Fast-forward to today… Widespread adoption of Hadoop is upon us.  The enterprise has placed requirements on the platform to not only provide perimeter security, but to also integrate with all types of authentication mechanisms. Oh yeah, and all the while, be easy to manage and to integrate with the rest of the secured corporate infrastructure. Kerberos can still be a great provider of the core security technology but with all the touch-points that a user will have with Hadoop, something more is needed.…

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As the Release Manager for hadoop-2.x, I’m very pleased to announce the next major milestone for the Apache Hadoop community, the release of hadoop-2.0.3-alpha!

2.0 Enhancements in this Alpha Release

This release delivers significant major enhancements and stability over previous releases in hadoop-2.x series. Notably, it includes:

• QJM for HDFS HA for NameNode (HDFS-3077) and related stability fixes to HDFS HA
• Multi-resource scheduling (CPU and memory) for YARN (YARN-2, YARN-3 & friends)
• YARN ResourceManager Restart (YARN-230)
• Significant stability at scale for YARN (over 30,000 nodes and 14 million applications so far, at time of release – see more details from folks at Yahoo! here)

Where is hadoop-2 and What is Left?

It is important to note that the this release is still considered alpha as there are a few items that still need to be addressed before we enter beta in the next couple months.…

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Pig can easily stuff Redis full of data. To do so, we’ll need to convert our data to JSON. We’ve previously talked about pig-to-json in JSONize anything in Pig with ToJson. Once we convert our data to json, we can use the pig-redis project to load redis.

Build the pig to json project:

git clone git@github.com:rjurney/pig-to-json.git
ant

Then run our Pig code:

/* Load Avro jars and define shortcut */
register /me/Software/pig/build/ivy/lib/Pig/avro-1.5.3.jar
register /me/Software/pig/build/ivy/lib/Pig/json-simple-1.1.jar
register /me/Software/pig/contrib/piggybank/java/piggybank.jar
define AvroStorage org.apache.pig.piggybank.storage.avro.AvroStorage();

register /me/Software/pig-to-json/dist/lib/pig-to-json.jar
register /me/Software/pig-redis/dist/pig-redis.jar

-- Enron emails are available at https://s3.amazonaws.com/rjurney_public_web/hadoop/enron.avro
emails = load '/me/Data/enron.avro' using AvroStorage();

json_test = foreach emails generate message_id, com.hortonworks.pig.udf.ToJson(tos) as bag_json;

store json_test into 'dummy-name' using com.hackdiary.pig.RedisStorer('kv', 'localhost');

Now run our Flask web server:

python server.py

Code for this post is available here: https://github.com/rjurney/enron-pig-tojson-redis-node.…

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At Hortonworks, our strategy is founded on the unwavering belief in the power of community driven open source software. In the spirit of openness, we think it’s important to share our perspectives around the broader context of how Apache Hadoop and Hortonworks came to be, what we are doing now, and why we believe our unique focus is good for Apache Hadoop, the ecosystem of Hadoop users, and for Hortonworks as well.

How did we get here? 

The core team here at Hortonworks started at Yahoo! where in 2005 Eric Baldeschwieler (aka “E14” and Hortonworks CTO) challenged Owen O’Malley (Hortonworks co-founder) and several others to solve a really hard problem: store and process the data on the internet in a simple, scalable and economically feasible way.  They looked at traditional storage approaches but quickly realized they just weren’t going to work for the type of data (much of it unstructured) and the sheer quantity Yahoo!…

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Hadoop Summit Europe 2013, the European extension of the original and world’s largest Apache Hadoop community conference, today announced its official program, featuring a keynote address from 451 Group Analyst and Research Manager for Data Management and Analytics Matt Aslett and 40 use cases and educational sessions from leading industry and community experts. In addition, Hadoop Summit Europe 2013 boasts an impressive list of Platinum, Gold and Silver sponsors, demonstrating ecosystem support for Apache Hadoop from leading producers of software and services for the enterprise.

Hadoop Summit Europe will be the first and largest European conference focused exclusively on accelerating the enterprise adoption of Apache Hadoop, held at the historic Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam on March 20-21, 2013. The event features sponsors ranging from traditional software companies to open source analytics vendors, confirming strong European interest in Hadoop.

Registration for Hadoop Summit Europe 2013 remains open, however, the conference is filling up fast.…

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According to the Transaction Processing Council, TPC-H is:

The TPC Benchmark™H (TPC-H) is a decision support benchmark. It consists of a suite of business oriented ad-hoc queries and concurrent data modifications. The queries and the data populating the database have been chosen to have broad industry-wide relevance. This benchmark illustrates decision support systems that examine large volumes of data, execute queries with a high degree of complexity, and give answers to critical business questions.

TPC-H was implemented for Hive in HIVE-600 and for Pig in PIG-2397 by Hortonworks intern Jie Li. In going over this work, I was struck by how it outlined differences between Pig and SQL.

There seems to be tendency for simple SQL to provide greater clarity than Pig. At some point as the TPC-H queries become more demanding, complex SQL seems to have less clarity than the comparable Pig.…

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Please join Hortonworks, Impetus and Entravision/Luminar for a webinar on how big data analytics is being used in the advertising industry to identify predictability models of consumer behavior. The webinar will take place on Tuesday, February 12th at 1pm (EST), 10am (PST).

Register Now

Big data analytics is becoming increasingly useful to professionals in digital media, gaming, healthcare, security, finance and government, and nearly every industry you can name. Companies are analyzing vast amounts of data from various sources to shed light on customer behaviors, accelerate lead conversion, pinpoint security threats and enrich social media marketing efforts. In fact, new tools and technologies are making it easier to harness the power of Big Data and put it to use, and businesses are quickly uncovering valuable insights that were previously unavailable.

Entravision Communications Corporation is one company looking to reap the benefit of big data through careful analytics.…

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