My Random notes n thoughts

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.

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.

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)

Here you can find the technical podcasts by IBM Analysts,which talks about Analytics and Big Data.
http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/podcast/big-data-all-data

Maybe you can spend this weekend listening and exploring about some new Big Data related technology and tools.

We all might have noticed(atleast the EIM members) that the Hadoop/Big Data has become the talk of the town. While we come across all these jargon, first thing is anxiety and confusion with all these terms. I am sure some of you might have been intrigued by the below questions like me:

How am i going to use it with my data warehouse?
How it is going to enhance the analytical applications in my enterprise or client place?
How can I breakdown the unstructured data using Hadoop for analytical needs?

The key to these questions is familiarizing ourselves with these Big Data technologies (Hadoop and Mapreduce).

There are lots of open source tools and Commercial Hadoop distributions offered by different vendors which are available as free downloads online. To name a few : Cloudera, HortonWorks, IBM BigInsights etc are famous Hadoop Distributions which I came across.

Recently I have downloaded Sandbox (Personal Hadoop Distribution) provided by Hortonworks and installed in my personal laptop and started exploring.
[Tip: By default, Virtualization is disabled in our laptops. Depending on whether the processor supports virtualization, I would recommend enabling this feature before trying to install Personal Hadoop distributions in your laptop.]

HortonWorks Sandbox - http://hortonworks.com/products/hortonworks-sandbox/
IBM Big Insights Quick Start edition - http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/biginsights/quick-start/

We certainly need a much clear picture and might required to explore a lot online about the landscape of all the tools, capabilities, purposes of each tools. Would like to share a nice link which I have came across which provides good picture about the Big-Data tools.
http://www.bigdatalandscape.com/
http://www.kernel-labs.org/node/2

You can also start your e-learning using the free course offered in the site ==> bigdatauniversity.com

For those of you who are familiar/well versed with Big Data/Hadoop related technologies, here is a interesting discussion about Cloudera vs IBM Bigsights - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQVMTmUgCj0

Happy Learning, Appreciate your comments, feedback and valuable experiences!