Is Hadoop Ready for the Future?

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ActianSTRATA CONFERENCE 2014 COVERAGE

Actian Corporation today challenged the industry to consider whether current implementations of Hadoop can translate to mainstream adoption. While many organizations have made significant Hadoop investments, most projects are still experimental.

The massive potential value of using analytics-enabled business processes to deliver transformational business impact remains largely untapped. The digital taps have been turned on and will never be turned off.  The tsunami of data has hit the shore with initiatives like the Internet of Things, and the question now is how businesses will get the maximum value from this data to create transformational advantage in a timely manner.

Every individual and business will shortly be influenced in their decisions by Big Data, and it’s widely acknowledged that legacy stacks just can’t scale adequately,” said Mike Hoskins, chief technology officer, Actian Corporation.  “While Hadoop is a tremendous step forward as pioneers drive business value from their big data assets, optimal adoption is limited to the privileged few with deep pockets and rarefied skills. Simplifying Hadoop and removing the reliance on dated MapReduce-driven approaches allows Actian to deliver ‘Big Data for the Rest of Us™.’”

According to a recent study conducted by Sand Hill Group, current top uses of Hadoop tend to be focused on ETL/ELT, data quality and preparation or augmenting an organization’s solution portfolio with basic analytics or business intelligence.Hoskins explains Actian’s commitment to industrialize Hadoop, noting that only a small minority of Hadoop projects are in production.  Hoskins said, “What’s needed is a robust layer around Hadoop, like an exoskeleton, that accelerates all stages of a big data analytics job natively in Hadoop, from design time through execution processing to specialized analytic workloads.”

Actian has done just that.  As Hoskins explained, “Hadoop has become the data lake and the Actian Analytics Platform surrounds it in a way that enables organizations of all sizes to move quickly into production and start realizing value. Actian enables you to immediately get a visual drag-and-drop framework to load, transform, and analyze data in Hadoop with up to 30x better design-time and run-time performance and no coding.” The Actian platform also gives companies high-performance analytics on Hadoop data to help them respond to events in real time and automate business processes with predictive and prescriptive models.

“Conventional wisdom holds that as a batch-oriented platform, Hadoop is not well suited for running high-performance analytics applications,” said Mike Vizard January 29, 2014 in ITBusinessEdge.  “This week, however, Actian unveiled the Actian Analytics Platform, which enables a massively parallel columnar database to natively process Hadoop data in a way that boosts analytics applications performance by a factor of ten.”

Actian’s YARN-certified platform accelerates native Hadoop processing and enables high-performance SQL queries on Hadoop using a massively parallel engine that is optimized for multi-node Hadoop implementations. Together, they make the power of Hadoop accessible to the broad market.  The Actian Analytics Platform now allows companies of any size to do what was previously limited to big companies.

Here is a compelling video by Shane Pratt, Senior Director of Excellence for Hadoop Analytics at Actian:

The Evernote Use Case Example

The combination of new-age software running on modern hardware is giving Actian’s customers a significant price/performance advantage and resulting in new use cases not feasible on legacy or Hadoop-only implementations. Evernote uses the Actian Analytics Platform to enhance high-speed marketing analytics to improve customer experience and accelerate effectiveness of A/B testing and digital campaigns – returning ad hoc queries on 25,000,000,000 rows of data in less than three seconds, as Evernote reports.  Evernote adopted the Actian Analytics Platform as part of its completely revamped architecture based on Hadoop, delivering scalability and performance for its demanding production environment. The Hadoop cluster, accessed via Hive, absorbs the rapidly accumulating log files, accommodating affordable, massive data storage and parallel batch processing jobs.  The data, however, is cloned into the Actian analytics database for more complex, multifaceted analytics. There, as Dave Engberg, Evernote CTO, notes, “We’re able to answer many types of questions much faster than we could with a brute-force crawl in Hive. We get a great performance boost with the Actian Analytics Platform.”

 

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  1. There are far easier ways to do it with minimal bash scripting and common sense enabling far better performance and the use of any linux compatible language or scripting for the processing side of things. C, bash, python. Same scripting any language.