My Random notes n thoughts

Being a family man, you don't often get this chance to travel like a bachelor. I utilized this time since my family is in India and decide to take a nomadic road trip. We had a great weekend travelling on this unplanned, sudden road trip. We Watched Captain America - Winter soldier On Friday Apr 4th evening, and decided to drive to St.Louis, MO and to visit Kansas City at the last minute almost during the end of the day.We booked a rental car and packed our luggage and all set for starting our journey.Drive from Wisconsin to Kansas City: We drove approximately for around 9-10 hrs (including breaks) via Iowa state without touching Chicago through Des Moines Iowa. Major Highways thru which we traveled during this leg are I88 W, I80 W and I39 S. We noticed the frequent availability of Gas pit stops and rest area. Noticed gas prices being little higher in Iowa compared to Missouri. This time we didn't use the Gas price app, but the gas price app will be good and provides options to plan for cheaper gas. Approximate total miles traveled during this leg is 570 Miles~580 Miles.Day 1 (Morning): We visited the World War I museum (liberty memorial) at 10 AM which is the opening time. It was informative and lots of history/information to process. Since the tickets are valid for 2 days, History Buffs can spend 2 days gathering interesting information. There are 2 sphinx statues on each side of the memorial covering their eyes. They are named as "Future" and "memory"Sphinx one "Memory" looks east, towards the past and the European Continent. Her wings cover her face, hiding it from the horrors of that past War.Sphinx two "Future" faces west, away from Europe and toward the future. Her wings also cover her face, since the future cannot be seen.They have a nice short video presentation narrating the World War I.After reading the Ken Follet's Novel Jackdaws recently, I was attracted towards the World War related stories. Lots of medals, guns and armory, military Equipments, War books, magazines, newspapers and Soldier's journals etc on display.more information related to WWI memorial can be found in the below sites:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Memorialtheworldwar.orgEven though there are other attractions listed in Kansas City, we decided to drive to St.Louis in the afternoon to visit the Gateway Arch.Day 1 (Afternoon and evening): Drive to St.Louis, Mo from Kansas CityAfter finishing our lunch in the liberty memorial, We set for our journey towards St.Louis, MO. This leg of the journey is from Kansas City, MO to St.Louis, MO on highway I70 E. It took around 4 hours to complete this leg, the distance traveled is around 260 miles. We reached Cathedral Basilica St.Louis around 5PM -5.30 PM, which is wrong time since tours are cancelled because of on-going mass prayers from 5-6 pm. We took some photos of the cathedral and decided not to wait and headed towards the Gateway arch/Mississippi River Walk trail in St.Louis, MO Downtown.We heard from some of the fellow travelers that the Gateway Arch tickets are booked and not available after noon. So parked our car in the Mansion place in downtown roamed around the arch and River walk trail. Because of construction in downtown area, there are lot of detours and GPS suggested routes didnt work for us.We decided not to stay in St.Louis and head towards Chicago(which is close to Home) after having dinner.Day2 : Chicago DowntownWe took turns in the wheel and slept a little in Rest Area during our journey to Chicago on I55 N. In between we stopped and watched movie Noah in AMC theater near Springfield, IL, which is best time/oppurtunity to charge the camera battery. we are able to find a outlet inside the theater and charged our camera Battery. The travel time is around 4-5 hrs and distance is around 300 miles.We thought about staying in Springfield, IL and visit AB Lincoln Memorial museum next day morning. Since we already had enough of history to process this weekend, we decided for Chicago downtown.Being visited Chicago a lot, I always have this feeling of liveliness in Chicago downtown. Tall skylines lifting your spirits up and astonishing view you could stare all day and marvel at the downtown architecture. We took a 70 min shoreline Architectural tour from Navy pier, which took us in all the branches of Chicago river in downtown. The guide is very informative covering all aspects of Chicago - Food, Brewery, Architecture, history and movies shooted in famous buildings. provides oppurtunity to take great photographs. Since architecture is not my cup of tea, some of them are way over my head but good to listen to.Next to the architecture tour, we visited Shedd Aquarium. The queue for regular tickets are long since the spring season is kicking off and people waited long enough this winter to get outdoors. To avoid the queue, You could either take Chicago City pass which will cover entrance fee for other attractions in Chicago downtown or some special ticket which cost 52$ per head. Jellies, Aquatic, Wild Reef and 4D shows in Shedd are my favorite and I plan to visit along with my kid who loves fishes and aquarium.Lake Shore walking trail near Field Museum, planetarium, and Aquarium campus is one of the best place I love to take photos of the downtown skylines.In order to get back to work on Monday, we decided to skip the other attractions and drove home for a good night rest. Getting Back to Work after vacation or your awesome weekend filled with Travel is daunting task, As I am facing one today! :)

I used to be irresponsible, lethargic and lazy person (Glad my mind is accepting and willing to improve!) both professionally and personally; making me looks like a stupid person at times. This kind of life style is very dangerous, makes you accept things happening in your life, without specific goals, wandering like a nomad with confused mindset about life. One fine day, I started getting this strange bad feeling internally and my sub-conscious mind started evaluating and scrutinizing my actions. This introspective behavior started questioning things, decisions and bringing more doubts and questions in my life. This is the impulse, starting point (whatever you want to call it!) in increasing your hunger to achieve more, improving your lifestyle and makes you run towards a certain point in life which you aspire for.1) Improving reading speed - This website Goodreads.com helps me a lot to establish the readings goals and to track it. Pushes you to start working towards achieving these. Last year 2013, I started with a small goal of reading 12 books and happy that I achieved it. This year I am trying to replicate the same and if possible increase the number of books.2) Achieving Writing skills - I started this process notes taking (using evernotes), reviewing, editing and refining to make it a blog to make this happen. Now I have this urge to write more blogs, I dont worry about the quality and quantity of the contents now. As I start experimenting with this, I am confident that I will get there. One thing I have been doing is keeping up blogging both in my work place (internally) and externally which you can share with your colleagues asking for feedback cordially.3) Tidying up your spending habits - The personal finance site mint.com is a great tool, to start with. You can link all your financial accounts (banks, Credit cards, auto loans and Employer Stock purchase etc), and provide you insights on your spending habits and discipline your self to respect the budget every month.4) I am also experimenting and working on improving my professional aspects of my life in parallel , by reading, following industry experts, tools and technologies. LinkedIn is a great site, and I love their news services PULSE! Dont know how far, I have traveled in this journey, hoping to cover more distance(Achievements) in the upcoming months.Happy Friday and Good weekend everyone!

Being a BI professional has its own advantage, there are several things you can do or experiment with using your personal data.

One such experience for me is creating visualizations using personal finance data (like spending, savings etc). Even though Mint.com site already combining all personal finance accounts data and provides interesting visualizations. It's worth the effort to try on our own using any desktop BI tools (Tableau, Qlikview, MSTR etc). It helps us professionals to learn about the tool and also the same time you can also gain insights/identify habits using your personal data (provided data quality is good ;).

Here are some such examples I have come across which are very helpful.

1) How to explore Cause and effect like a Data Scientist (http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/02/how-to-explore-cause-and-effect-like-a-data-scientist/) : An interesting visualization attempt by author using his personal health related (diet, travel and weight) data, explaining how can we we use Visualization for doing Causal analysis.

2) Create your own LinkedIn Connection Maps (http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/): Today I have come across this link in one of the Business Intelligence discussion forums. This site lets you to visualize your LinkedIn connections, which is very intuitive and insightful. Based on the different colors in the map, you can categorize and group your connections. Here is my LinkedIn Connection map:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/linkedin_inmaps/65a1089ddeefc46a0a9fa507712eaaf644a4fe464dce4b2cff2b645033edfb117e73b1999d7ab4adf9a5d92331b33da9140b1476fb3f365ae48cccc68d60e6ab/inmap.gif?timestamp=20140303

3) We can select and watch better movies tonight: Qlikview has this interesting demo based on the Movies data, you can find this in the link : http://us.demo.qlikview.com/detail.aspx?appName=Movies%20Database.qvw This demo has the list of movies based on rating/ director/year/ actor/ title. I just did the quick analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's movies; and I found Vertigo is the top rated movie directed by him. Definitely planning to watch this movie. (Note: Non Techie movie aficionado dont have to feel jealous, yes this link doesn't need any technical knowledge. That's the power of Self service BI! ;))

Following IBM BigInsights Quick edition and HortonWorks Sandbox the personal Hadoop environments to educate /train the customers and developers which I have came across, It's MapR's turn to release the MapR customized Sandbox Hadoop environment for developers.More details about this can be found in the MapR blog.

Each year Gartner (leading IT research company) is releasing "Magic Quadrant Research" reports and predictions, Comparing the major technology market. Few Examples which we might have come across are Magic Quadrants for MDM, Data-Integration, Cloud Computing, BI and Analytics etc. These reports gives idea about the competing technology providers in the corresponding market segment which can be considered while evaluating the products for consideration in client places. Also helps the professionals to get educated about the competing products in the market which provides same or better functionalities/capabilities and corresponding strengths and Challenges in the market segment we are working on.To understand more about the Magid Qudarants and the associated research methodologies, Please refer this link.Being interested lately in Big Data and Hadoop related technologies and evolution of Big Data Analytics in the technology market, I was keenly interested in watching Analytics technology market segment and confused about the future of traditional analytics. Due to this particular interest, I got a chance to look into the "Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms" - A free report which Tableau is offering in their site now if you want to get our hands on.After reading the report on high level, I came to know that Gartner splits the analytics technology market report into 2 separate reports. Until last year, we used to have only one for all the Business Intelligence and Analytics technology providers. Here is the statement from Gartner Report explaining why it has decided to have 2 different research reports. "Since 2006, Gartner has published a Magic Quadrant on BI and analytics (the name has changed slightly over the years) to evaluate vendors across the entire spectrum of BI and analytic capabilities but focused on their ability to provide traditional query and reporting (descriptive) capabilities. During the past few years, interactive visualization (diagnostic), predictive and prescriptive analysis has become more important to organizations, and this has been reflected in the vendors evaluated in the Magic Quadrant and their positions therein.In 2013, Gartner's analytics research team decided that the scope of the Magic Quadrant had grown to cover multiple markets. Although the decisions were sometimes connected, the evaluation process that most clients followed for "traditional" BI capabilities had become separate from that used to evaluate "advanced" analytic capabilities. Hence the team decided it was time to introduce an additional Magic Quadrant on advanced analytics platforms.The new "Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms" covers the diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive components, but assigns most weight to the predictive.The present "Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms" encompasses all four components - descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive - but allocates more weight to the descriptive and diagnostic.Some vendors have offerings that qualify them for inclusion in both Magic Quadrants."Please refer the below images for the magic quadrants corresponding to Traditional and Advanced Analytics.Magic Quadrant for Traditional BI and Analytics:Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics:Let me know your feedback, comments.

Recently I have watched the movie "The Book Thief" , Which is a World War based story based on the Novel of the same name. This movie inspired to read more about World War related thrillers. Accidentally during my next visit to local library, I bumped into this book "Jackdaws" by Ken Follett.

This story is about the undercover operation of England's SOE and France's Resistance in north France to blow up a major Telephone exchange located in Saint Cecilia, Which is key to the Germans communication network. Since the earlier attempt to strike on the Telephone exchange got failed, SOE planned to send a all female agents under the Jackdaws operation who will be disguised as cleaners of the telephone exchange facility.

The title Jackdaws is the code name of the undercover operation, which symbolizes a bird in the crow family found in and around Saint Cecilia region. Felicity Clairet also called as Flick is the leader of the operation. It enthralls the readers and Often at times puts us to the edge of the seat, making us to think and anticipate about Flick's encounter with Dieter Frank who is the German Army Intelligence officer.

Reading experience of this book, attracted me to pick few more Ken Follett books. I am planning to read few more titles, especially "Eye of the needle" which was renamed as Storm Island!

There can't be a better time, to bump into this blog about the topic "SQL-On-Hadoop". As you might have noticed, My previous blog is about the same genre, comparing the SQL on Hadoop solutions provided by few key vendors on the Big-Data/Hadoop space (Big SQL, Hive, Impala etc). This blog gives details about a lot more products, which are offering SQL-On-Hadoop capabilities (Some of them I haven't even heard before! But nice to know) which are showcased in Strata Conference this year.

Lately with the explosion and availability of more Big Data tools, most of the DB vendors started providing support/connectors dedicated to connecting Hadoop clusters. Also packaged Hadoop distributions from vendors like Cloudera, IBM etc are integrating SQL engines along with Hadoop distributions. Here are few examples, I have come across:1) SQLH connector provided by Teradata - This connector is used to bring data from Hadoop Cluster into the traditional Teradata based Datawarehouse applications. 2) gNet for Hadoop (supported by Greenplum) : A Connector for Hadoop environments which enables to exchange data between DB and Hadoop clusters, Provides Direct Query interoperability between Hadoop Nodes and GP DB nodes and supports Conversion of Custom format data (Pig, Hive etc) into GPDB format via apReduce which can be imported into GP.3) Big Blue's BigSQL - which is little bit different from the above connectors which is just a SQL interface to query the Hadoop cluster. We can plug in any front end reporting/analytics with the support of BigSQL to the Hadoop cluster directly. 4) Cloudera Impala - Cloudera Impala provides fast, interactive SQL queries directly on your Apache Hadoop data stored in HDFS or HBase. In addition to using the same unified storage platform, Impala also uses the same metadata, SQL syntax (Hive SQL), ODBC driver, and user interface (Cloudera Impala query UI in Hue) as Apache Hive. This provides a familiar and unified platform for real-time or batch-oriented queries. (Well, if you are confused about the difference between Impala and Hive, please refer the link:-http://vision.cloudera.com/impala-v-hive/(Above list is not complete and to be explored). While reading about these updates, blogs, articles etc online related to Hadoop and Hadoop related support for traditional RDBMS, I have come across this How-to blog explaining the integration details about interfacing data between Haddop distribution and Teradata.http://hortonworks.com/blog/round-trip-data-enrichment-teradata-hadoop/I felt exactly the same like the author of this blog in the below point."As a data integrator who is familiar with RDBMS systems and is new to the Hadoop platform, I was looking for a simple way (i.e. “SQL-way") to exchange data with Teradata. Fortunately, it was just a matter identifying the tools and connecting the dots."Being installed Hortonworks Sandbox in my personal laptop, I am looking forward to recreating these steps. But that might require Teradata environment which I need to set up yet (not sure whether free version for personal learning is available).Also here is interesting discussion videos comparing Hadoop landscape provided by IBM's Big-Insights with other vendors. Teradata compared with Big-Insights:http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/video/hadoop-competitive-landscape-teradata-compared-ibm-biginsightsCloudera Compared with Big-Insights:http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/video/hadoop-competitive-landscape-cloudera-compared-ibm-biginsightsLet me know if you have any interesting updates/info, experiences to share about these. It seems SQL has got the green card to stay alove in the Hadoop Landscape because of the importance to support traditional Analytical tools along with Big-Data Analytics.

I have came across this interesting link which is showing 5 stunning Big Data Visualizations.I have decided to embed the one liked, which is intuitive since the visualization is about the Big-Data itself (mapping the vendors who are providing Big-Data solutions)

After failing miserably in my current role, which made me to realize the below information hard way. Came across this good article about setting expectations at our client's place .

http://www.sysflow.com/blog/setting-expectations/