A couple of months ago, I found myself without a full time gig for the first time in decades, and I did a little freelance blogging. Being an overachiever, I wrote such a long post for Adaptive Systems Inc. that I broke it into two parts. The first part got published before I dove head first into documenting and unit testing a big Hadoop implementation. The second part got published last week.

It was interesting reading my opinions on the nature and comparative strengths of the various strategies and technologies from a few months ago. It had been long enough that I didn’t remember what I’d written. I got a kick out of comparing my perspective, now that I have some recent hands-on experience digging through Hive code, comparing query speed with ORC vs without, or with MapReduce vs Tez.

In part 1, I made Shakespeare roll in his grave by misquoting Hamlet repeatedly, while talking about the merits of schema on read versus schema on write strategies in Hadoop data lake projects. This time, I butchered Romeo and Juliet when looking at SQL in Hadoop technologies that use these two strategies, and recommended how to decide which ones to use for your next Hadoop data lake project. Main point: it depends on which balcony you want to climb. And either way, SQL is not off the menu just because you’re using Hadoop.

Yup, still feel pretty much the same on the subject. Nothing new there. Glad to see the post get released into the wild at last.

Life has taken a radical shift, though. This is the first time in ages that I’ve had a job where social media activity wasn’t part of the job description. My blog has been neglected. My Twitter followers probably think I fell off the face of the earth. But no. Still here. Just heads down a lot of the time, digging through code and quizzing folks about why this strategy was picked, or how this problem was solved.

I go through phases in my life where I learn and practice, and other phases where I assimilate and share. Of course, all of my life has been a mishmash of both, but the pendulum swings more toward one end of the spectrum or the other sometimes. Right now, I’m swimming in information and splashing around like a kid in summer.

My friend Alan J. Porter wrote a great book about content management called The Content Pool, and another friend, Doug Potter, did this awesome cover illustration. I feel like that guy on the cover. (Buy that book, btw, if you do anything content management related. It’s a must have.)

I still owe everybody a Storm post, and it is coming, but I’ve also been learning a lot about Apache Nifi, ironically recently re-named DataFlow. Expect a post to come on that. I wrote something up a couple weeks ago about reasons Hadoop implementations fail. That’s bound to show up somewhere soon.

Stay tuned … Same bat time, same bat channel.

On another note, I’m interested in comparing ETL workflow orchestration tools, especially open source ones, but also good commercial ones if they’re not priced out of the usual Hadoop market. I’m looking for things that are Oozie-like, but better than Oozie. (Oozie is NOT one of my favorite Hadoop ecosystem bits.)

Suggestions?