Summary: In part one of Experimenting with Hadoop MapReduce on the AWS Platform, we developed an Amazon VPC environment suitable as the foundation to deploy Hadoop MapReduce. In part two, we present an Amazon CloudFormation template that can be used to automate the creation of the aforementioned environment. We also …

Summary: In this article, we present a solution architecture suitable as a foundation for a Hadoop MapReduce pilot on the AWS platform. We start by considering under what circumstances an organisation may want to manage their own Hadoop MapReduce platform on EC2 instead of simply using Amazon Elastic Map Reduce …

Summary: In this article we look at the burgeoning field of Interactive Data Preparation. We take a close look at what it is, why its becoming increasingly valuable, some common use cases, recent commercial activity and why industry trends will continue to fuel investment in this space.

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Data analytics is increasingly becoming a tool for organisations to help their customers live richer, healthier and more engaged lives and not just provide a means for targeted marketing of products and services. In this short article, we look at how RunKeeper is using data analytics to improve the lives …

Data provenance, or data lineage as it is otherwise known, refers to the process of recording the origin and transform history of data throughout its lifetime. In this short article, we take a look at data lineage from the perspective of data analytics, specifically with a focus on large [Big …

Last week, Google announced significant price reductions for their cloud storage service, Google Drive. This is of course great news for consumers; you can now store 1TB of data for $9.99 per month. This is approximately the same cost of storing 1TB of data on Amazon Glacier. While both …

In February 2014, UC Berkeley AMPLab published their latest benchmark comparing the performance of Amazon Redshift, Apache HIVE, AMPLab Shark, Cloudera Impala and Apache Stinger/Tez; the latest benchmark included more recent versions of each analytics framework and added Apache Tez to the test group. As one would expect, the …