Mark your calendars, all you data cyclists!

I’m visiting Paris, London, and Edinburgh this June. When I travel I like to talk to locals. And, wherever I am, I like to bicycle. So, I thought I might combine these interests and host “data rides” in these three cities.

In each city I’ll name a time and a meeting point, and then ride the local roads for an hour or two with whomever shows up. Afterward, we might need some libations at a local pub. I might even get Cloudera to throw in some schwag.

The schedule/agenda grid for HBaseCon 2013 (rapidly approaching: June 13 in San Francisco) is a thing of beauty.

If you lacked motivation to register up until this point, we think that this session line-up will convince you otherwise. We repeat: whether you’re an HBase committer or just getting started (or at any level in between), HBaseCon is simply an event that you can’t afford to miss – and with an entry fee of just $350, it’s also one you can easily afford.

The post below was originally published at blogs.apache.org/hbase. We re-publish it here for your convenience.

Apache HBase is a distributed big data store modeled after Google’s Bigtable paper. As with all distributed systems, knowing what’s happening at a given time can help  spot problems before they arise, debug on-going issues, evaluate new usage patterns, and provide insight into capacity planning.

Since October 2008, version 0.19.0 (HBASE-625), HBase has been using Apache Hadoop’s metrics system to export metrics to JMX, Ganglia, and other metrics sinks. As the code base grew, more and more metrics were added by different developers. New features got metrics. When users needed more data on issues, they added more metrics. These new metrics were not always consistently named, and some were not well documented.

“Are data warehouses becoming victims of their own success?”, Tony Baer asks in a recent blog post:

At Cloudera, we have the privilege of helping thousands of developers learn Apache Hadoop, as well as build and deploy systems and applications on top of Hadoop. While we (and many of you) believe that platform is fast becoming a staple system in the data center, we’re also acutely aware of its complexities. In fact, this is the entire motivation behind Cloudera Manager: to make the Hadoop platform easy for operations staff to deploy and manage.

So, we’ve made Hadoop much easier to “consume” for admins and other operators — but what about for developers, whether working for ISVs, SIs, or users? Until now, they’ve largely been on their own.

That’s why we’re really excited to announce the Cloudera Developer Kit (CDK), a new open source project designed to help developers get up and running to build applications on CDH, Cloudera’s open source distribution including Hadoop, faster and easier than before. The CDK is a collection of libraries, tools, examples, and documentation engineered to simplify the most common tasks when working with the platform. Just like CDH, the CDK is 100% free, open source, and licensed under the same permissive Apache License v2, so you can use the code any way you choose in your existing commercial code base or open source project.

It’s time for me to give you a quarterly update (here’s the one for Q1) about where to find tech talks by Cloudera employees in 2013. Committers, contributors, and other engineers will travel to meetups and conferences near and far to do their part in the community to make Apache Hadoop a household word!

(Remember, we’re always ready to assist your meetup by providing speakers, sponsorships, and schwag.)

A couple highlights:

As a follow-up to a previous post about the Impala demo he built during Data Hacking Day, Alan Gardner from Pythian has deployed the app for a limited time on Amazon EC2. We republish his original post below.

A little while ago I blogged about (and open sourced) a Cloudera Impala-powered soccer visualization demo, designed to demonstrate just how responsive Impala queries can be. Since not everyone has the time or resources to run the project themselves, we’ve decided to host it ourselves on an EC2 instance. [Note: instance live only for one week!] You can try the visualization; we’ve also opened up the Impala web interface, where you can see query profiles and performance numbers, and Hue (username and password are both ‘test’), where you can run your own queries on the dataset.

Deploying Impala on EC2

While there are many tools to deploy a Hadoop cluster on EC2 – like Apache Whirr, or even Cloudera Manager – I only wanted to use a single instance for the entire cluster. Starting from the base Ubuntu (Precise)  image, I added Cloudera’s apt repos, and installed the single node configuration. Impala doesn’t support using Derby for the Hive metastore, so I installed MySQL and configured Hive to use it instead. Then I installed Impala using Cloudera’s instructions. Impala, and all of the Hadoop daemons, are running comfortably on one M3 2XLarge EC2 instance. Given our modest demands, this may actually be overkill; I over-spec’ed the server trying to find a (now-obvious) performance problem involving short-circuit reads.

Short-Circuit Reads

In the technology business, building a thriving and progressive user ecosystem around a platform is about as Mom-and-apple-pie as you can get. We all intuitively acknowledge that it’s one of the metrics for success.

Perhaps the most under-appreciated aspect of any platform ecosystem is the recognition that it is fundamentally built by real people. Without enthusiastic users of a platform engaging as evangelists on its behalf, the growth of the ecosystem around it will eventually slow to a crawl.

Last month, Apache Crunch became the fifth project (along with Sqoop, Flume, Bigtop, and MRUnit) to go from Cloudera’s github repository through the Apache Incubator and on to graduate as a top-level project within the Apache Software Foundation. As the founder of the project and a newly minted Apache VP, I wanted to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the Crunch community, who have taught me that leadership in the Apache Way means service, humility, and investing more time in building a community than I spend writing code. Working with you all on our shared vision is the highlight of every work week.

Creating Analytical Applications with Crunch: Cloudera ML

The Crunch Java libraries operate at a lower level of abstraction than other tools for creating MapReduce pipelines, like Apache Pig, Apache Hive, or Cascading. Crunch does not make any assumptions about the data model in your pipeline, which makes it easy to create data pipelines over non-relational data sources such as time series, Avro records, and Mahout Vectors. In fact, I originally wrote Crunch while I was working on Seismic Hadoop, a command line tool for processing time series of seismic measurements on Hadoop.

When the data science team sat down with our training team to begin planning our next data science course, we quickly discovered that there weren’t any open-source tools in the Hadoop ecosystem that would allow students to perform the data preparation and model evaluation techniques that we wanted them to learn. For example, it wasn’t possible to quickly summarize a CSV file of numerical and categorical variables via a single MapReduce job, and then use that summary to convert the CSV file into the distributed matrix format that is used as input to many of Mahout’s algorithms. We were also concerned that there wasn’t a lot of guidance as to how to choose values for many of the parameters that Mahout’s algorithms require, and that this might discourage new data scientists from using these models effectively.

Data scientists drive data as a platform to answer previously unimaginable questions. These multi-talented data professionals are in demand like never before because they identify or create some of the most exciting and potentially profitable business opportunities across industries. However, a scarcity of existing external talent will require companies of all sizes to find, develop, and train their people with backgrounds in software engineering, statistics, or traditional business intelligence as the next generation of data scientists.

Join us for the premiere of Training a New Generation of Data Scientists on Tuesday, March 26, at 2pm ET/11am PT. In this video, Cloudera’s Senior Director of Data Science, Josh Wills, will discuss what data scientists do, how they think about problems, the relationship between data science and Hadoop, and how Cloudera training can help you join this increasingly important profession. Following the video, Josh will answer your questions about data science, Hadoop, and Cloudera’s Introduction to Data Science: Building Recommender Systems course.

Register today!