December 9, 2010
Devoxx – Day 2 HBase # Devoxx featured several interesting case studies of how HBase and Hadoop can be used to scale data analysis back ends as well as data serving front ends. Twitter
Dmitry Ryaboy from Twitter explained how to scale high load and large data systems using Cassandra. Looking at the sheer amount of tweets generated each day it becomes obvious that with a system like MySQL alone this site cannot be run.
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December 8, 2010
Devoxx – Day two – Hadoop and HBase # In his session on the current state of Hadoop Tom went into a little more detail not only on the features released in the latest release or on the roadmap for upcoming releases (including Kerberos based security, append support, warm standby namenode and others).
He also gave a very interesting view on the current Hadoop ecosystem. More and more projects are currently being created that either extend Hadoop or are built on top of Hadoop.
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December 8, 2010
Apache Mahout Meetup in San Jose # A few hours ago the Mahout Meetup at MapR Technologies in San Jose/CA ended. Two photos taken at the event leaked - happy to be able to publish them here.
More information on the discussions and more technical details to follow. Stay tuned.
December 7, 2010
Devoxx – Day two – Caching # Day two started with a really good talk on caching architectures by Greg Luck. He first motivated why caching works: Even with SSIDs being available now there is still a huge performance gap between RAM access times and having to go to disk. The issue is even worse in systems that are architected in a distributed way making frequent calls to remote systems.
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December 6, 2010
Devoxx – University – Cassandra, HBase # During the morning session FIXME Ellison gave an introduction to the distributed NoSQL database Cassandra. Being generally based on the Dynamo paper from Amazon the key-value store distributes key/value pairs according to a consistent hashing schema. Nodes can be added dynamically making the system well suited for elastic scaling. In contrast to Dynamo, Cassandra can be tuned for the required consistency level. The system is tuned for storing moderately sized key/value pairs.
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December 5, 2010
Devoxx University – MongoDB, Mahout # The second tutorial was given by Roger Bodamer on MongoDB. It concentrates on being horizontally scalable by avoiding joins and complex, multi document transactions. It supports a new data model that allows for flexible, changeable “schemas”. The exact data layout is determined by the types of operations you expect for your application, by the access patterns (reading vs. writing data; types of updates and types of queries).
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December 5, 2010
Frau Holle, Frau Holle # Winter arrived in Germany - below a few pictures I took last Thursday morning:
Seems like this season winter is trying real hard to prove that I am wrong saying that there is no real winter in Berlin with just about a week snow on the streets ;) Guess its time to get the tires with spikes back on my bike.
December 4, 2010
Devoxx University – Productive programmer, HBase # The first day at Devoxx featured several tutorials – most interesting to me was the pragramatic programmer. The speaker also is the author of the equally named book at O’Reilly. The book was the result of the observation that developers today are more and more IDE bound, no longer able to use the command line effectively. The result are developers that are unnecessarily slow when creating software.
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December 3, 2010
Devoxx Antwerp # With 3000 attendees Devoxx is the largest Java Community conference world-wide. Each year in autumn it takes place in Antwerp/ Belgium, in recent years in the Metropolis cinema. The conference tickets were sold out long before doors were opened this year.
The focus of the presentations are mainly on enterprise Java featuring talks by famous Joshua Bloch, Mark Reihnhold and others on new features of the upcoming JDK release as well as intricacies of the Java programming language itself.
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December 2, 2010
Teddy in Amsterdam Schiphol # Caught Teddy just before the plane took off: