Here is a roundup of some recent Big Analytics news and analysis. General SiliconAngle covers the Big Data money trail. Apache Spark Curt Monash writes about Databricks and Spark on his DBMS2 blog. On the Databricks blog, Dave Wang summarizes Spark highlights from Strata + Hadoop World. In this post, Hammer Lab describes how to monitor Spark with Graphite and
Read moreFirst, a review of last year’s predictions: (1) Apache Spark matures as the preferred platform for advanced analytics in Hadoop. At the New York Strata/Hadoop World conference in October, if you took a drink each time a speaker said “Spark”, you would struggle to make it past noon. At my lunch table, every single person said his company is currently
Read moreFor an overview of Spark, see the Apache Spark Page. On September 11, the Spark team announced release of Spark 1.1. This latest version of Spark includes a number of significant enhancements: As announced at the Spark Summit, Shark is now converged with Spark SQL. Databricks has migrated its Shark workloads to Spark, and reports 2X-5X performance improvement. The
Read moreSAS’ recent announcement of an alliance with Hortonworks marks a good opportunity to summarize SAS’ Hadoop capabilities. Analytic enterprises are increasingly serious about using Hadoop as an analytics platform; organizations with significant “sunk” investment in SAS are naturally interested in understanding SAS’ ability to work with Hadoop. Prior to January, 2012, a search for the words “Hadoop” or “MapReduce”
Read moreMichael Kinsley wrote: It used to be, there was truth and there was falsehood. Now there is spin and there are gaffes. Spin is often thought to be synonymous with falsehood or lying, but more accurately it is indifference to the truth. A politician engaged in spin is saying what he or she wishes were true, and sometimes, by coincidence,
Read moreLast week I attended the O’Reilly Strata 2013 Conference. Here are some notes on presentations pertinent to analytics, in four categories: Vendors Users Technical Thought Provokers Vendor Presentations We wouldn’t have trade shows without sponsors, and the big ones get ten minutes of fame. Some used their time well, others not so much. I’ll refrain from shaming the bloviaters,
Read moreAnalytics conferences tend to be held in places like Orlando or Las Vegas, where it’s sunny and warm all of the time and there are copious incidental pleasures to fill the off hours. I can’t speak to the incidental pleasures of Minneapolis in January, but warm it is not; peak temperature on Monday had a minus sign in front of
Read moreBig Data Big Analytics: Emerging Business Intelligence and Analytic Trends for Today’s Businesses, by Michael Minelli, Michele Chambers and Ambiga Dhiraj. Books on Big Data tend to fall into two categories: they are either “strategic” and written at a very high level, or they are cookbooks that tell you how to set up a Hadoop cluster. Moreover, many of these
Read moreForrester’s latest assessment of predictive analytics vendors is available here; news reports summarizing the report are here, here and here. A few comments: (1) While the “Wave” analysis purports to be an assessment of “Predictive Analytics Solutions for Big Data”, it is actually an assessment of vendor scale. You can save yourself $2,495 by rank-ordering vendors by revenue and get similar results. (2) The
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