Owen O’Malley is one of the folks I chatted with at the last Hadoop Summit in San Jose. I already discovered the first time I met him that he was the big Tolkien geek behind the naming of ORC files, as well as making sure that Not All Hadoop Users Drop ACID. In this conversation, I learned that Hadoop and Spark are both partially his fault, about the amazing performance strides Hive with ORC, Tez and LLAP have made, and that he’s a Trek geek, too.
Big Data Page by Paige
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Archive for Syncsort tag
So, is this a situation you recognize? Your team creates ETL and data preparation jobs for the Hadoop cluster, puts a ton of work into them, tunes them, tests them, and gets them into production. But Hadoop tech changes faster than Texas weather. Now, your boss is griping that the jobs are taking too long, but they don’t want to spring for any more nodes. Oh, and “Shouldn’t we be using this new Spark thing? It’s what all the cool kids are doing and it’s sooo much faster. We need to keep up with the competition, do this in real-time.”
You probably want to pound your head on your desk because, not only do you have to hire someone with the skills to build jobs on another new framework, and re-build all of your team’s previous work, but you just know that in a year or two, about the time everything is working again, some hot new Hadoop ecosystem framework will be the next cool thing, and you’ll have to do it all over again.
Doing the same work over and over again is so very not cool. There’s got to be a better way. Well, there is, and my company invented it. And now I’m allowed to talk about it.
Our director of engineering told me that she had a customer ask if we could do real-time data processing with Syncsort DMX-h. Knowing that real-time means different things to different people, the engineer asked what exactly the customer meant by real-time. He said, “We want to be able to move our data out of the database and into Hadoop in real-time every two hours.”
When she told me that story, I wanted to quote Inigo Montoya from “The Princess Bride.” You keep using that word, “real-time.” I do not think it means what you think it means.
But what does real-time actually mean? And what do you really mean when you say real-time? What do other people usually mean when they say real-time? How can you tell which meaning people are using? And what the heck is near real-time?
2016 marks my nineteenth year in the field of data wrangling. Yee haw. (I’m from Texas. I can say that.) January also marks my first year, my first week in fact, at my new job at Syncsort. I flew up to the company headquarters in New Jersey and spent the first week of the year getting to know the new team and the new technology. Certain things jumped out at me as good signs. It started with a coffee cup.
It’s a brand new year, and I’ve got a brand new job. As of today, you’re looking at the new Product Marketing Manager for Syncsort.
It’s true. After spending half a year doing a little freelance white paper work for the Bloor Group, and documenting for Hortonworks the most complex ETL process I’ve seen in nearly two decades in the business, I’ve found a new home to settle into. I got courted by some Goliaths in the data management software and hardware space, but in the end, I chose a tech savvy David, Syncsort.