Readers would be pleased to know that we have teamed up with Packt Publishing to organize a Giveaway of our book HBase Design Patterns.

Three lucky winners stand a chance to win e-copy of the book. Keep reading to find out how you can be one of the Lucky One.

Overview:

• Design HBase schemas for the most demanding functional and scalability requirements 
• Optimize HBase's handling of single entities, time series, large files, and complex events by utilizing design patterns 
• Written in an easy-to-follow style, and incorporating plenty of examples, and numerous hints and tips. 

How to Enter?

All you need to do is head on over to the book page and look through the product description of the book and drop a line via the comments below this post to let us know what interests you the most about this book. It’s that simple.

Winners will get an e-copy of the Book.

Deadline 

The contest will close on February 1, 2015. Winners will be contacted by email, so be sure to use your real email address when you comment!

Hadoop goes to Harvard

There is a community of Big Data experts called Experfy, and it is "Made in Boston" and backed by Harvard Innovation Lab. They do Hadoop there, and have pretty interesting projects. This would make Hadoop quite happy.

Packt’s $5 eBonanza returns

Just got these news from Packt (of course this includes our recently published book)

Following the success of last year’s festive offer, Packt Publishing will be celebrating the Holiday
season with an even bigger $5 offer. From Thursday 18th December, every eBook and video will be available on the publisher’s website for just $5. Customers are invited to purchase as many as they like before the offer ends on Tuesday January 6th, making it the perfect opportunity to try something new or to take your skills to the next  level as 2015 begins.

With all $5 products available in a range of formats and DRM-free, customers will find great value
content delivered exactly how they want it across Packt’s website this Xmas and New Year.

Find out more at www.packtpub.com/packt5dollar

#packt5dollar

Media Contact: sam@packtpub.com

About Packt Publishing

Founded in 2004 in Birmingham, UK, Packt’s mission is to help the world put software to work in new ways, through the delivery of effective learning and information services to IT professionals. Working towards that vision, we have published over 2000 books and videos so far, providing IT
professionals with the actionable knowledge they need to get the job done –whether that’s specific
learning on an emerging technology or optimizing key skills in more established tools.

As part of our mission, we have also awarded over $1,000,000 through our Open Source Project Royalty scheme, helping numerous projects become household names along the way.

Big Data Cartoon - What is text analytics?

Analytics may be the next big thing in Big Data, but it is very hard to define what it really is. Firstly, this word shows as misspelled in the browser and in Word or OpenOffice. Secondly, it's too vague and nebulous. As always, when in doubt, we turn to our illustrator, and our RK can illuminate us with a simple to understand cartoon that even data scientists can get.

Big Data Cartoon - What's the latest and greatest in Hadoop?

What's the latest and greatest in Hadoop? Ask this question, and many people will say "Real-time" and point to Spark. Look at Berkeley's AMP labs two-day seminar going on right now, for example.

But what is Spark, really? What are those RDD's? They stand for Resilient Distributed Datasets, but is it any clearer? We asked our illustrator to clarify this, and hopefully we got it explained.

Announcing HBase Design Patterns Book

Happy to announce the "HBase Design Patterns" book, by Mark Kerzner and Sujee Maniyam. The book just went into production and can be pre-ordered using this link: https://www.packtpub.com/big-data-and-business-intelligence/hbase-design-patterns.

The book offers an HBase and NoSQL developer practical guidance in designing and implementing real-world applications. Subjects covered include

• Various HBase install options
• Single entity tables
• Key generation
• Storing large files
• Dealing with time series data
• Advanced modeling
• Performance optimization
• A number of labs and exercises

Based on the authors' own work, research and experience gained  in writing the open source book "Hadoop Illuminated." Oh, and did we forget to mention cartoons by RK? Each chapter has at least one.

Cheers,

Mark & Sujee

An excellent presentation by Rohit Jain about exciting new open source product Trafodion

Rohit Jain drove from Austin and presented Trafodion (Welsh for "Transaction"), pronounced "Travodion" - for those in the know. Rohit is an HP Database Distinguished and Chief Technologist. The breadth and depth of his knowledge is amazing.

In turn, the audience did not betray the expectations.  Houston is getting its Big Data people, by importing them, and people from Cloudera, Hortonworks and DataStax were all represented.

Pizza was sponsored by HP - thank you - and Rohit has already uploaded the slides to the Meetup. Here are the main slides, and the architecture

, with this note from Rohit: "There was interest in the Trafodion Distributed Transaction Management (DTM) architecture. However, it is a bit dated. Since this presentation, DTM has now been implemented as HBase co-processor code & THLOG has been integrated with the HBase HLOG."

My comment: I started Houston Hadoop Meetup in 2010, with the expectation of an imminent Big Data Boom in Houston. I am still expecting. This was the first meetup though where we had active Big Data professionals, but they were all imported, as I said, from Big Data companies. We are still yet to see native Houstonians and Houston companies doing Big Data. Again, it's coming, and our meetup is one of the focal points.