Update time!  As a reminder, Cloudera releases major versions of CDH, our 100% open source distribution of Apache Hadoop and related projects, annually and then updates to CDH every three months.  Updates primarily comprise bug fixes but we will also add enhancements.  We only include fixes or enhancements in updates that maintain compatibility, improve system stability and still allow customers and users to skip updates as they see fit.

We’re pleased to announce the availability of CDH4.1.  We’ve seen excellent adoption of CDH4.0 since it went GA at the end of June and a number of exciting use cases have moved to production.  CDH4.1 is an update that has a number of fixes but also a number of useful enhancements.  Among them:

Organizations in diverse industries have adopted Apache Hadoop-based systems for large-scale data processing. As a leading force in Hadoop development with customers in half of the Fortune 50 companies, Cloudera is in a unique position to characterize and compare real-life Hadoop workloads. Such insights are essential as developers, data scientists, and decision makers reflect on current use cases to anticipate technology trends.

Recently we collaborated with researchers at UC Berkeley to collect and analyze a set of Hadoop traces. These traces come from Cloudera customers in e-commerce, telecommunications, media, and retail (Table 1). Here I will explain a subset of the observations, and the thoughts they triggered about challenges and opportunities in the Hadoop ecosystem, both present and in the future.

Table 1. Summary of Hadoop workloads analyzed

The following is a guest post kindly offered by Adam Kawa, a 26-year old Hadoop developer from Warsaw, Poland. This post was originally published in a slightly different form at his blog, Hakuna MapData!

Recently I have found an interesting dataset, called Million Song Dataset (MSD), which contains detailed acoustic and contextual data about a million songs. For each song we can find information like title, hotness, tempo, duration, danceability, and loudness as well as artist name, popularity, localization (latitude and longitude pair), and many other things. There are no music files included here, but the links to MP3 song previews at 7digital.com can be easily constructed from the data.

The dataset consists of 339 tab-separated text files. Each file contains about 3,000 songs and each song is represented as one separate line of text. The dataset is publicly available and you can find it at Infochimps or Amazon S3. Since the total size of this data sums up to around 218GB, processing it using one machine may take a very long time.

In June 2012, Eli Collins (@elicollins), from Cloudera’s Platforms team, led a session at QCon New York 2012 on the subject “Introducing Apache Hadoop: The Modern Data Operating System.” During the conference, the QCon team had an opportunity to interview Eli about several topics, including important things to know about CDH4, main differences between MapReduce 1.0 and 2.0, Hadoop use cases, and more. It’s a great primer for people who are relatively new to Hadoop.

You can catch the full interview (video and transcript versions) here.

We are happy to announce the general availability of CDH3 update 5. This update is a maintenance release of CDH3 platform and provides a considerable amount of bug-fixes and stability enhancements. Alongside these fixes, we have also included a few new features, most notable of which are the following:

Last month at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Cloudera CEO Mike Olson presented some work the Cloudera Data Science Team did to analyze adverse drug events. We decided to share more detail about this project because it demonstrates how to use a variety of open-source tools – R, Gephi, and Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH) – to solve an old problem in a new way.

Background: Adverse Drug Events

An adverse drug event (ADE) is an unwanted or unintended reaction that results from the normal use of one or more medications. The consequences of ADEs range from mild allergic reactions to death, with one study estimating that 9.7% of adverse drug events lead to permanent disability. Another study showed that each patient who experiences an ADE remains hospitalized for an additional 1-5 days and costs the hospital up to $9,000.

Some adverse drug events are caused by drug interactions, where two or more prescription or over-the-counter (OTC) drugs taken together leads to an unexpected outcome. As the population ages and more patients are treated for multiple health conditions, the risk of ADEs from drug interactions increases. In the United States, roughly 4% of adults older than 55 are at risk for a major drug interaction.

The Development track at Hadoop World is a technical deep dive dedicated to discussion about Apache Hadoop and application development for Apache Hadoop. You will hear committers, contributors and expert users from various Hadoop projects discuss the finer points of building applications with Hadoop and the related ecosystem. The sessions will touch on foundational topics such as HDFS, HBase, Pig, Hive, Flume and other related technologies. In addition, speakers will address key development areas including tools, performance, bringing the stack together and testing the stack. Sessions in this track are for developers of all levels who want to learn more about upcoming features and enhancements, new tools, advanced techniques and best practices.

Preview of Development Track Sessions

Building Web Analytics Processing on Hadoop at CBS Interactive
Michael Sun, CBS Interactive

This is a guest post contributed by Dmitriy Ryaboy (@squarecog) and was originally published in his blog on December 19th. We thought the information was valuable enough that it was worth reposting to spread the word even further. 

Our vision for Hadoop World is a conference where both newcomers and experienced Hadoop users can learn and be part of the growing Hadoop community.

We are also offering training sessions for newcomers and experienced Hadoop users alike. Whether you are looking for an Introduction to Hadoop, Hadoop Certification, or you want to learn more about related Hadoop projects we have the training you are looking for.

With the recent release of CDH3b2, many users are more interested than ever to try out Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop (CDH). One of the questions we often hear is, “what does it take to migrate?”.

Why Migrate?

If you’re not familiar with CDH3b2, here’s what you need to know.

All versions of CDH provide: