Introduction to data Artisans and Flink
data Artisans and Flink basics start:
- Flink is an Apache project sponsored by the Berlin-based company data Artisans.
- Flink has been viewed in a few different ways, all of which are similar to how Spark is seen. In particular, per co-founder Kostas Tzoumas:
- Flink’s original goal was “Hadoop done right”.
- Now Flink is focused on streaming analytics, as an alternative to Spark Streaming, Samza, et al.
- Kostas seems to see Flink as a batch-plus-streaming engine that’s streaming-first.
Like many open source projects, Flink seems to have been partly inspired by a Google paper.
To this point, data Artisans and Flink have less maturity and traction than Databricks and Spark. For example: Read more
Notes on HBase
I talked with a couple of Cloudera folks about HBase last week. Let me frame things by saying:
- The closest thing to an HBase company, ala MongoDB/MongoDB or DataStax/Cassandra, is Cloudera.
- Cloudera still uses a figure of 20% of its customers being HBase-centric.
- HBaseCon and so on notwithstanding, that figure isn’t really reflected in Cloudera’s marketing efforts. Cloudera’s marketing commitment to HBase has never risen to nearly the level of MongoDB’s or DataStax’s push behind their respective core products.
- With Cloudera’s move to “zero/one/many” pricing, Cloudera salespeople have little incentive to push HBase hard to accounts other than HBase-first buyers.
Also:
- Cloudera no longer dominates HBase development, if it ever did.
- Cloudera is the single biggest contributor to HBase, by its count, but doesn’t make a majority of the contributions on its own.
- Cloudera sees Hortonworks as having become a strong HBase contributor.
- Intel is also a strong contributor, as are end user organizations such as Chinese telcos. Not coincidentally, Intel was a major Hadoop provider in China before the Intel/Cloudera deal.
- As far as Cloudera is concerned, HBase is just one data storage technology of several, focused on high-volume, high-concurrency, low-latency short-request processing. Cloudera thinks this is OK because of HBase’s strong integration with the rest of the Hadoop stack.
- Others who may be inclined to disagree are in several cases doing projects on top of HBase to extend its reach. (In particular, please see the discussion below about Apache Phoenix and Trafodion, both of which want to offer relational-like functionality.)
| Categories: Cloudera, Clustering, Data models and architecture, Database diversity, Hadoop, HBase, Hortonworks, HP and Neoview, Intel, Market share and customer counts, NoSQL, Open source | 4 Comments |
Notes and comments, May 6, 2014
After visiting California recently, I made a flurry of posts, several of which generated considerable discussion.
- My claim that Spark will replace Hadoop MapReduce got much Twitter attention — including some high-profile endorsements — and also some responses here.
- My MemSQL post led to a vigorous comparison of MemSQL vs. VoltDB.
- My post on hardware and storage spawned a lively discussion of Hadoop hardware pricing; even Cloudera wound up disagreeing with what I reported Cloudera as having said. 🙂 Sadly, there was less response to the part about the partial (!) end of Moore’s Law.
- My Cloudera/SQL/Impala/Hive apparently was well-balanced, in that it got attacked from multiple sides via Twitter & email. Apparently, I was too hard on Impala, I was too hard on Hive, and I was too hard on boxes full of cardboard file cards as well.
- My post on the Intel/Cloudera deal garnered a comment reminding us Dell had pushed the Intel distro.
- My CitusDB post picked up a few clarifying comments.
Here is a catch-all post to complete the set. Read more
Hardware and storage notes
My California trip last week focused mainly on software — duh! — but I had some interesting hardware/storage/architecture discussions as well, especially in the areas of:
- Rack- or data-center-scale systems.
- The real or imagined demise of Moore’s Law.
- Flash.
I also got updated as to typical Hadoop hardware.
If systems are designed at the whole-rack level or higher, then there can be much more flexibility and efficiency in terms of mixing and connecting CPU, RAM and storage. The Google/Facebook/Amazon cool kids are widely understood to be following this approach, so others are naturally considering it as well. My most interesting of several mentions of that point was when I got the chance to talk with Berkeley computer architecture guru Dave Patterson, who’s working on plans for 100-petabyte/terabit-networking kinds of systems, for usage after 2020 or so. (If you’re interested, you might want to contact him; I’m sure he’d love more commercial sponsorship.)
One of Dave’s design assumptions is that Moore’s Law really will end soon (or at least greatly slow down), if by Moore’s Law you mean that every 18 months or so one can get twice as many transistors onto a chip of the same area and cost than one could before. However, while he thinks that applies to CPU and RAM, Dave thinks flash is an exception. I gathered that he thinks the power/heat reasons for Moore’s Law to end will be much harder to defeat than the other ones; note that flash, because of what it’s used for, has vastly less power running through it than CPU or RAM do.
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Buying processes, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, Intel, Memory-centric data management, Pricing, Solid-state memory | 19 Comments |
The Intel investment in Cloudera
Intel recently made a huge investment in Cloudera, stated facts about which start:
- $740 million …
- … for 18% of the company …
- … as part of an overall $900 million round.
- SEC filings coming soon with more details.
Give or take stock preferences, etc., that’s around a $4.1 billion valuation post-money, but Cloudera does say it now has “most of $1 billion” in the bank.
Cloudera further told me when I visited last Friday that the majority of the Intel investment is net new money. (I presume that the rest of the round is net-new as well.) Hence, I conclude that previous investors sold in the aggregate less than 10% of total holdings to Intel. While I’m pretty sure Mike Olson is buying himself a couple of nice toys, in most respects it’s business-as-usual at Cloudera, with the same investors, directors and managers they had before. By way of contrast, many of the “cashing-out” rumors going around are OBVIOUSLY absurd, unless you think Intel acquired a much larger fraction of Cloudera than it actually did.
That said, Intel spent a lot of money, and in connection with the investment there’s a tight Cloudera/Intel partnership. In particular, Read more
| Categories: Cloudera, Hadoop, Intel | 5 Comments |
Hadoop news and rumors, June 23, 2013
Cloudera
- Cloudera changed CEOs last week. Tom Reilly, late of ArcSight, is the new guy (I don’t know him), while Mike Olson’s titles become Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer. Mike told me Friday that Reilly had secretly been working with him for months.
- Mike shared good-sounding numbers with me. But little is for public disclosure except the stat >400 employees.
- There are always rumors of infighting at Cloudera, perhaps because from earliest days Cloudera was a place where tempers are worn on sleeves. That said, Mike denied stories of problems between him and COO Kirk Dunn, and greatly praised Kirk’s successes at large-account sales.
- Cloudera now self-identifies pretty clearly as an analytic data management company. The vision is multiple execution engines – MapReduce, Impala, something more memory-centric, etc. – talking to any of a variety of HDFS file formats. While some formats may be optimized for specific engines – e.g. Parquet for Impala – anything can work with more or less anything.*
- Mike told me that Cloudera didn’t have any YARN users in production, but thought there would be some by year-end. Even so, he thinks it’s fair to say that Cloudera users have substantial portions of Hadoop 2 in production, for example NameNode failover and HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) performance enhancements. Ditto HCatalog.
*Of course, there will always be exceptions. E.g., some formats can be updated on a short-request basis, while others can only be written to via batch conversions.
Everybody else
- There’s a widespread belief that Hortonworks is being shopped. Numerous folks – including me — believe the rumor of an Intel offer for $700 million. Higher figures and alternate buyers aren’t as widely believed.
- Views of MapR market traction, never high, are again on the downswing.
- IBM Big Insights seems to have some traction.
- In case there was any remaining doubt — DBMS vendors are pretty unanimous in agreeing that it makes sense to have Hadoop too. To my knowledge SAP hasn’t been as clear about showing a markitecture incorporating Hadoop as most of the others have … but then, SAP’s markitecture is generally less clear than other vendors’.
- Folks I talk with are generally wondering where and why Datameer lost its way. That still leaves Datameer ahead of other first-generation Hadoop add-on vendors (Karmasphere, Zettaset, et al.), in that I rarely hear them mentioned at all.
- I visited with my client Platfora. Things seem to be going very well.
- My former client Revelytix seems to have racked up some nice partnerships. (I had something to do with that. :))
| Categories: Cloudera, Data warehousing, Datameer, Hadoop, Hortonworks, IBM and DB2, Intel, MapR, Market share and customer counts, Platfora, SAP AG, Zettaset | 11 Comments |
Hadoop distributions
Elephants! Elephants!
One elephant went out to play
Sat on a spider’s web one day.
They had such enormous fun
Called for another elephant to come.
Elephants! Elephants!
Two elephants went out to play
Sat on a spider’s web one day.
They had such enormous fun
Called for another elephant to come.
Elephants! Elephants!
Three elephants went out to play
Etc.
— Popular children’s song
It’s Strata week, with much Hadoop news, some of which I’ve been briefed on and some of which I haven’t. Rather than delve into fine competitive details, let’s step back and consider some generalities. First, about Hadoop distributions and distro providers:
- Conceptually, the starting point for a “Hadoop distribution” is some version of Apache Hadoop.
- Hortonworks is still focused on Hadoop 1 (without YARN and so on), because that’s what’s regarded as production-ready. But Hortonworks does like HCatalog.
- Cloudera straddles Hadoop 1 and Hadoop 2, shipping aspects of Hadoop 2 but not recommending them for production use.
- Some of the newer distros seem to be based on Hadoop 2, if the markitecture slides are to be believed.
- Optionally, the version numbers of different parts of Hadoop in a distribution could be a little mismatched, if the distro provider takes responsibility for testing them together.
- Cloudera seems more willing to do that than Hortonworks.
- Different distro providers may choose different sets of Apache Hadoop subprojects to include.
- Cloudera seems particularly expansive in what it is apt to include. Perhaps not coincidentally, Cloudera folks started various Hadoop subprojects.
- Optionally, distro providers’ additional proprietary code can be included, to be used either in addition to or instead of Apache Hadoop code. (In the latter case, marketing can then ensue about whether this is REALLY a Hadoop distribution.)
- Hortonworks markets from a “more open source than thou” stance, even though:
- It is not a purist in that regard.
- That marketing message is often communicated by Hortonworks’ very closed-source partners.
- Several distro providers, notably Cloudera, offer management suites as a big part of their proprietary value-add. Hortonworks, however, is focused on making open-source Ambari into a competitive management tool.
- Performance is another big area for proprietary code, especially from vendors who look at HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and believe they can improve on it.
- I conjecture packaging/installation code is often proprietary, but that’s a minor issue that doesn’t get mentioned much.
- Hortonworks markets from a “more open source than thou” stance, even though:
- Optionally, third parties’ code can be provided, open or closed source as the case may be.
Most of the same observations could apply to Hadoop appliance vendors.
| Categories: Cloudera, Data warehouse appliances, EMC, Greenplum, Hadoop, Hortonworks, IBM and DB2, Intel, MapR, Market share and customer counts | 5 Comments |
Catching up with Cray
Cray is a legendary name in supercomputing hardware. Cray CTO Bill Blake (Netezza’s early-rise VP Development) seem to be there in part because of Cray’s name and history. I’m now consulting to Cray largely because of Bill Blake, specifically to Cray subsidiary Yarcdata. Along the way, I’ve picked up enough about Cray in general — largely from Bill and from Cray president Pete Ungaro — to perhaps be worth splitting out as a separate post.
Cray business highlights include:
- After a meandering and financially disappointing journey, Cray is again a stand-alone public company.
- Cray is a computer systems company.
- Cray makes a large fraction of its revenue from selling and supporting a small number of supercomputers, largely to scientific, technical, and government customers.
- Even so, Cray sells systems at a broad range of price points. Storage products are in the mix as well.
I haven’t sorted through all the details in Cray’s SEC filings, but huge government contracts play a big role, as do the associated revenue recognition delays.
At the highest level, Cray’s technical story looks like: Read more
Updating our vendor client disclosures
Edit: This disclosure has been superseded by a March, 2012 version.
From time to time, I disclose our vendor client lists. Another iteration is below. To be clear:
- This is a list of Monash Advantage members.
- All our vendor clients are Monash Advantage members, unless …
- … we work with them primarily in their capacity as technology users. (A large fraction of our user clients happen to be SaaS vendors.)
- We do not usually disclose our user clients.
- We do not usually disclose our venture capital clients, nor those who invest in publicly-traded securities.
- Included in the list below are two expired Monash Advantage members who haven’t said they will renew, as mentioned in my recent post on analyst bias. (You can probably imagine a couple of reasons for that obfuscation.)
With that said, our vendor client disclosures at this time are:
- Aster Data
- Cloudera
- CodeFutures/dbShards
- Couchbase
- EMC/Greenplum
- Endeca
- IBM/Netezza
- Infobright
- Intel
- MarkLogic
- ParAccel
- QlikTech
- salesforce.com/database.com
- SAND Technology
- SAP/Sybase
- Schooner Information Technology
- Skytide
- Splunk
- Teradata
- Vertica
Clarifying SAS-in-the-DBMS, and other SAS tidbits
I followed up with Keith Collins of SAS today about SAS-in-the-database, expanding on what I learned or thought I did when we talked last month. Here’s the scoop:
SAS users do a lot of data filtering, aka data preparation, in SAS. These have WHERE clauses, just like SQL. However, only some of them map to actual SQL WHERE clauses. SAS is now implementing many of the rest as UDFs (User-Defined Functions), one DBMS at a time, starting with Teradata. In addition, SAS users can write custom filters that get registered as UDFs. This capability will be released with SAS 9.2. (The timing on SAS 9.2 is in line with the comment thread to my prior post on SAS-in-the-DBMS.) Read more