July 9th, 2013 — Data management
On Wednesday, July 17, at 11:00am ET / 8:00am PT, I’ll be taking part in a webinar in association with MarkLogic on the subject of Hadoop.
As we’ve stated a few times, we believe that the flexibility of Apache Hadoop is one of its biggest assets – enabling organizations to generate value from data that was previously considered too expensive to be stored and processed in traditional databases – but it also results in “Hadoop” meaning different things to different people.
The result is that organizations still struggle over which Hadoop ecosystem components to adopt in order to obtain the greatest value, which application workloads might be suitable for deployment on Hadoop, and how to deploy Hadoop in conjunction with existing relational and non-relational databases.
On the webinar I’ll be providing an overview of the current state of the Hadoop ecosystem, geographic adoption, use cases, while MarkLogic’s Director of Product Management Justin Makeig to will provide an introduction to complementary technology from MarkLogic that can help your organization achieve real-time analysis, transactional data updates, integrity, granular security, and full-text search.
For full details, and to register, click here.
June 28th, 2013 — Data management
Hortonworks raises $50m, previews next-generation Hadoop. And more
And that’s the data day, today.
June 10th, 2013 — Data management
Beyond Hadoop. IBM embraces MongoDB. And more.
And that’s the data day, today.
June 10th, 2013 — Data management
I am planning on doing a major overhaul of this during the second half of the year, with a specific focus on the Hadoop sector, but in the interim, here’s the latest June 2013 update to our Database Landscape map.
Note: the latest update to the map is available here.
April 26th, 2013 — Data management
Pivotal launches. SkySQL and Mony Program merge. And much, much more
April 19th, 2013 — Data management
‘Information governance’ in the era of big data. MariaDB Foundation takes next steps. And more.
And that’s the data day, today.
April 17th, 2013 — Data management
Many enterprises were persuaded to adopt enterprise data warehousing (EDW) technology to achieve a ‘single version of the truth’ for enterprise data.
In reality, the promises were rarely fulfilled with many stories of failed, lengthy and over budget projects. Even if an EDW project reached deployment, the warehouse schema is designed to answer a specific set of queries and is inflexible to change and accommodate growing variety of data.
On April 30 at 1pm ET I’ll be taking part in a webinar with NGDATA to discuss whether ‘big data’ technologies such as Hadoop, HBase and Solr can deliver on the promise of “single version of truth” by providing a real-time, 360° view of customers and products.
In this webinar, you will learn:
- Why the inflexibility of EDWs failed to deliver 360° view
- How big data technologies can finally make 360° view a reality
- Overview of an interactive Big Data management solution
- Best practices and success stories from leading companies
For more details, and to register, click here.
April 12th, 2013 — Data management
Funding for MarkLogic and ParElastic. And more
And that’s the data day, today.
March 14th, 2013 — Data management
SAP’s predictive analytics plans. Dell’s Boomi MDM. And more
And that’s the data day, today.
March 11th, 2013 — Data management
Pivotal HD is not Hadoop
Neither is Cloudera’s Distribution, including Apache Hadoop.
Nor the Hortonworks Data Platform.
Nor the MapR Distribution.
Nor IBM’s InfoSphere BigInsights.
Nor the WANdisco Distro.
Nor Intel’s Distribution for Apache Hadoop.
Apache Hadoop is Hadoop. And Hadoop is Apache Hadoop.
I don’t write that to be pedantic, or controversial, but because it is the only logical conclusion you can reach after reading Defining Apache Hadoop from the Apache Hadoop Wiki.
“The key point is that the only products that may be called Apache Hadoop or Hadoop are the official releases by the Apache Hadoop project as managed by that Project Management Committee (PMC)… Products that are derivative works of Apache Hadoop are not Apache Hadoop, and may not call themselves versions of Apache Hadoop, nor Distributions of Apache Hadoop.”
It is with this in mind that one should view the reaction to EMC Greenplum’s recent launch of of Pivotal HD; and in particular this statement from Scott Yara, EMC Greenplum senior Vice President, Products and Co-Founder:
“We’re all in on Hadoop, period.”
What does it mean to be “all in on Hadoop”? Based on a strict reading of Defining Apache Hadoop (a document that demands by its own words to be read strictly), being “all in” on Hadoop means only one thing: being “all in” on Apache Hadoop.
I have no doubt that EMC Greenplum is “all in” on Pivotal HD, but that’s not the same thing at all.
Not a purity debate
There is nothing wrong with offering additional functionality beyond the scope of Apache Hadoop – the licensing terms clearly encourage it.
As my fellow analyst Merv Adrian notes:
“Having some components of your solution stack provided by the open source community is a fact of life and a benefit for all. So are roads, but nobody accuses Fedex or your pizza delivery guy of being evil for using them without contributing some asphalt.”
That is true. However, to continue the analogy, you would expect any company that claimed to be “all in on roads” to be getting involved in laying and maintaining them, rather than just driving on top of them.
Despite what some people may think this isn’t a matter of arguing about which vendor has the most Hadoop committers. It is a matter of defining what users understand Hadoop to be, and what they understand it not to be. It is a matter of drawing a line between Hadoop – Apache Hadoop – and additional, proprietary, functionality beyond the scope of the project.
User preference
Whether users will choose to go with a pure approach to Hadoop-based products and services is another matter. Dan Woods, for one, clearly believes that products like Pivotal HD will drive further mainstream adoption beyond “the limits of open source.”
The idea is that most enterprises don’t care if it meets the Apache definition of Hadoop or not, as long as it works.
While I have no doubt that some companies will be drawn to the additional features and confidence that vendors such as EMC and Intel can provide, I have also spoken to multiple enterprises – including one very large enterprise just last week – for which the preference is to default to open in order to avoid any potential for lock-in and vendor-specific architecture choices.
There are many vendors that do very much care whether what they are adopting meets the Apache definition of Hadoop.
Which of these attitudes will dominate? I’m not going to pretend I know the answer to that question at this point, but our previous coverage of open source adoption suggests that once the door to openness has been unlocked its very hard to force it shut again.
Dan Woods responded to my (sarcastic) comment about this as follows:
I would dispute that players like IBM, HP, and Intel “took Linux over” but in any case it is undeniable that they had a significant role to play – alongside Red Hat, Novell et al, and individual developers – in turning Linux into an enterprise-grade operating system.
The point is though that they did so by engaging with the Linux project, not by launching their own differentiated versions of Linux.
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