I attended the Strata Conference last week and although I did not catch the talks, the buzz was definitely in the air on the show floor.    “Machine Learning,” “I am  a Data Scientist” and “we are showing off a Hadoop connector” seemed like the most common pick up lines. Our Helicopter giveaways was amongst the most popular. I Wish I had one of them, but, as a Couchbase employee I was not eligible.

Our own James Phillips spoke at a well attended session on Connecting Mobile devices to the cloudWe demonstrated a Hadoop connector as well on the show floor. The idea was that Couchbase would be used as a System of Record for making decisions that often need to be made in sub-milli-seconds. However, these decisions are made based on summarized information available from processing copious amount of data available regarding personal preferences, location data, event data (did the showing of the advertisement lead to a view, a click or a buy) and so on.

In the interactions I had with attendees, being able to use a high performant data layer for real-time decisions coupled with a decision layer for helping make these real-time decisions seemed to resonate well. From a technical perspective, we used sqoop to import the data as Key, Value pairs into Hadoop at which point a variety of tools supported by the Hadoop ecosystem become available. We used pig for analyzing the data and running ad-hoc queries such as how many of the actual ads. were clicked, what were the most popular items and so on.

Based on the quality of interaction, there is no doubt that Big Data is prime time. I look forward to the next installment of the Strata conference in Oct. 2012 which is being billed as a merger of StrataConf and Hadoop World.

Author

Posted by Raghavan Srinivas, Developer Advocate, Couchbase

Raghavan "Rags" Srinivas was a Developer Advocate at Couchbase getting his hands dirty with emerging technology directions and trends. His general focus area is in distributed systems, with a specialization in cloud computing. He worked on Hadoop and HBase during its early stages. He has spoken on a variety of technical topics at conferences around the world, conducted and organized Hands-on Labs and taught graduate classes in the evening. Rags brings with him about 20 years of hands-on software development and about 10 years of architecture and technology evangelism experience. He worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Intuit and Accenture. He has worked on several technology areas, including internals of VMS, Unix and NT to Hadoop and HBase. He has evangelized and influenced the architecture of a number of technology areas including the early releases of JavaFX, Java, Java EE, Java and XML, Java ME, AJAX and Web 2.0, Java Security and so on. Rags holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the Center of Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

3 Comments

  1. Would you be showing the connector at a Hadoop Meetup @Yahoo:disqus 
    http://www.meetup.com/hadoop/#… 

     ?

    Or maybe just have an event for the group at Couchbase

    1. Doing a talk at the Meetup or hosting the Meetup at our office location in Mountain View are possibilities.

      We can discuss the logistics and related details via rags at couchbase.com.

  2. Ken:

    Either of those options are a possibility i.e. talking about the Hadoop connector at an event hosted by Couchbase or outside.

    Let\’s discuss this offline – rags at couchbase.com.

    Rags

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