Introduction to Datastax Brisk : an Hadoop and Cassandra distribution

As the Apache Hadoop ecosystem grows while its core matures, there are now several companies providing business-class Hadoop distribution and services. While EMC, after it acquires Greenplum, seem the biggest player other companies such as Cloudera or MapR are also competing.

This article introduces Datastax Brisk, an innovative Hadoop distribution that leverage Apache Hive data warehouse infrastructure on top of an HDFS-compatible storage layer, based on Cassandra. Brisk try to reconcile real-time applications with low-latency requirement (OLTP) and big data analytics (OLAP) in one system. “Oh really ?”
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Using Hadoop for Value At Risk calculation Part 6

In the first part, I described the potential interest of using Hadoop for Value At Risk calculation in order to analyze intermediate results. In the three (2,3, 4) next parts I have detailled how to implement the VAR calculation with Hadoop. Then in the fifth part, I have studied how to analyse the intermediate results with Hive. I will finally give you now some performance figures on Hadoop and compare them with GridGain ones. According to those figures, I will detail some performance key points by using such kind of tools. Finally, I will conclude why Hadoop is an interesting choice for such kind of computation.
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Using Hadoop for Value At Risk calculation Part 5

In the first part of this series, I have introduced why Hadoop framework could be useful to compute the VAR and analyze intermediate values. In the second part and third part and fourth part I have given two concrete implementations of VAR calculation with Hadoop with optimizations. Another interest of using Hadoop for Value At Risk calculation is the ability to analyse the intermediate values inside Hadoop through Hive. This is the goal of this (smaller) part of this series.
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Using Hadoop for Value At Risk calculation Part 4

In the first part of this series, I have introduced why Hadoop framework could be useful to compute the VAR and analyze intermediate values. In the second part and in the third part I have given two concrete implementations of VAR calculation with Hadoop. I will now give you some details about the optimizations used in those implementations.
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Using Hadoop for Value At Risk calculation Part 3

In the first part of this series, I have introduced why Hadoop framework could be useful to compute the VAR and analyze intermediate values. In the second part I have described a first implementation. One drawback of this previous implementation is that it does not take advantage of the reduce pattern. I did it by hand. I will now fully use Hadoop reduce feature.

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Using Hadoop for Value At Risk calculation Part 2

In the first part of this series, I have introduced why Hadoop framework could be useful to compute the VAR and analyze intermediate values. In that second part I will give you a first concrete implementation of the VAR calculation with Hadoop.

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Using Hadoop for Value At Risk calculation Part 1

After introducing the Value at Risk in my first article, I have implemented it using GridGain in my second article. I conclude in this latter that relatively good performances have been reached through some optimizations. One of them was based on the hypothesis that the intermediate results – the prices for each draw – can be discarded. However, it is not always the case. Keeping the generated parameters and the call price for each draw can be very useful for business in order to analyze the influence of the different parameters. Such data are often crunched by Business Intelligence. VAR calculation is maybe not the best business use case in order to illustrate that need but I will reuse it as it has already been defined. The purpose of this new series of articles will be to compute the Value at Risk and keep all results, to be able to analyze them.

  • In this first part, I will describe how to persist that data both with GridGain and with Hadoop;
  • In the three next parts I will go into details of different implementations with Hadoop. These parts provide interesting code examples but can be safely discard in first read;
  • Then in the fifth part, I will show how to use Hadoop to do Business Intelligence on the data;
  • And in the last part, I will give some performance figures and improvement possibilities.

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How to “crunch” your data stored in HDFS?

HDFS stores huge amount of data but storing it is worthless if you cannot analyse it and obtain information.

Option #1 : Hadoop : the Map/Reduce engine

Hadoop Overview

Hadoop is a Map/Reduce framework that works on HDFS or on HBase. The main idea is to decompose a job into several and identical tasks that can be executed closer to the data (on the DataNode). In addition, each task is parallelized : the Map phase. Then all these intermediate results are merged into one result : the Reduce phase.

In Hadoop, The JobTracker (a java process) is responsible for monitoring the job, (more…)

Hadoop Distributed File System : Overview & Configuration

Hadoop Distributed File System can be considered as a standard file system butt it is distributed. So from the client point of view, he sees a standard file system (the one he can have on your laptop) but behind this, the file system actually runs on several machines. Thus, HDFS implements fail-over using data replication and has been designed to manipulate, store large data sets (in large file) in a write-one-read-many access model for files.
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