Apache Hadoop Get Together March 2010 #

Today (or more correctly, yesterday) the March 2010 Hadoop Get Together took place in newthinking store. I arrived rather early to have some time to do some planning for Berlin Buzzwords - got there nearly one hour before the meetup. However it did not take very long until first guests came to the store. So I quickly got my introductory slides in place - Martin from newthinking already had the room setup, camera in place and audio working.

When starting the meetup the room was already packed with some 60 people - we ended up having over 70 people interested in the mix of talks on Hadoop, HBase and Spatial search with Lucene and Solr. Doing the regular “Who are you”-round, we learned that there were people from nurago, Xing, StudiVZ, lots and lots of people from Nokia, Zanox, eCircle, nugg.ad and many others.

The meetup was kindly supported by newthinking store (venue for free) and Nokia (sponsored the videos). Steffen Bickel took his chance during the introduction to give a brief overview of Nokia and - guess - explain, that Nokia is a great place to work and yeah - they are hiring!

The first talk was given by Bob Schulze who joined the meetup coming from eCircle in Munich. Given his previous experience with scaling their infrastructure from a regular database/ datawarehouse setup he explained how HBase helped when processing really large amounts of data. Being an e-mail marketing provider, eCircle does have quite a bit of data to process. And yes, eCircle is hiring.

Second talk was by Dragan Milosevic from Zanox on scaling product search and reporting with Hadoop. Just as eCircle, Zanox came from a regular RDMS setup that became too expensive and too complex too scale before switching over to a Hadoop/Lucene stack. He used his chance to make the Lucene developers aware of the fact that there are users who would were actually using Lucene’s compression features. Zanox, as well, is looking for people to hire.

Last talk was by Chris Male from JTeam in Amsterdam on the developments in Lucene and Solr to support for spatial search. There are various development routes being followed: Cartesian tiers as well as numeric range searches. He also explained that most of the features are still under heavy development. He finished his talk with a demo on what can be done with spatial search in Lucene/ Solr. You already guessed so, JTeam is hiring as well ;)

After the talks we went to Cafe Aufsturz for beers, drinks and some food. People enjoyed talking to each other exchanging experiences. A Lucene focussed table quickly formed - main topics: Spatial search, Lucene/Solr merge threads, heavy committing, Mike McCandless (is this guy real or just an alter-ego of the Lucene community?).

At some time around 11p.m. the core of the guests (well - the Lucene part of the meetup, that is Simon, Uwe and the guys from JTeam) moved over to a bar close by next to cinema central for some more beer and drinks. At about 1a.m. it finally was time to head home.

I’d like to say thanks: First of all to the speakers. Without you the meetup would not be possible. Second to newthinking and Nokia for their support. And of course to all attendees for having grown the meetup to its current size.

I had a really nice evening with people from the Hadoop, HBase and Lucene community. Special thanks to you guys from JTeam for traveling 6h to Berlin just for a “little”, though no longer that tiny, Hadoop meetup. Promise stands, to visit one of your next Lucene meetups in Amsterdam and present Mahout there - however I need some help finding affordable accomodation ;)

Hope to see you all in June at Berlin Buzzwords.