Adventures in the Land of CloudDB/NoSQL/NoAcid

KKline — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 13:44:00 GMT

Cloud, Bunny, or CloudBunny?

Last year, some of my friends from Quest Software attended Hadoop World in New York. In 2009, I never would've guessed that Quest would be there with products, community initiatives, as a major sponsor and with presenters?

There were just under 1,000 attendees who weren’t the typical devheads and geekasaurs you'd normally see at very techie events like Code Camps, SQL Saturdays, Cloud Camps and or even other NoSQL events such as the Cassandra Summit. We're talkin' enterprise customers with active Hadoop projects underway.

Some observations from the show that may be of interest to you:

- Hadoop World was a trending topic on Twitter during its duration.

- Hadoop has "arrived" with an average cluster of 66 nodes weighing in at 114TB. (For the philosophers among us, how much does a terabyte weigh?) The most famous Hadoop cluster is FaceBook with a trifling 30PB in storage - that's petabytes. That's more written information than has ever been written by man, cumulatively, including the Advice on Men column from Cosmo Magazine. Unfortunately, that's only a few hundred thousand pictures of teenagers pursing their lips at themselves and holding a digital camera while standing in front of the bathroom mirror. They're expecting about 60PB by the end of 2011.

- HP was there, creating a lot of buzz, from a hardware perspective.

- Quest was there as the leading independent tool maker for cloud apps.

- Oracle OraOop got attendees pulse's racing, since many want a high speed, scalable connector between Oracle and Hadoop to fill a necessary gap. I'm not sure if there's something in place for SQL Server and I'm not currently aware of any high-speed connectors built in to SQL Server Integration Services.

Some other good coverage to check out about the show as well:

Why Should You Care?

All of this is very important because NoSQL in general and Hadoop in particular are picking up speed and momentum. Even if your organization isn't using NoSQL technology today, chances are very good that your CIO will be asking you for details on how and when it should be deployed. And if you don't think it should be deployed, the natural response of the CIO is "Why not?". So you'd better get your ducks in a row, Mr SQL Server DBA.

There are lots of great sites to get Hadoop information, but I invite you to take a gander at Jeremiah Peschka's (blog | twitter) blog for much NoSQL goodness. Start with Jeremiah's blog post here, and ignore all indications that you might be in a biker bar or a San Francisco tattoo parlor. That's just Jeremiah's style.

His Hadoop writings are here, though lately he's been writing a lot about RIAK - which sounds like a euphemism for vomiting, as in "Jeremiah spent a lot of time riaking after chugging that bottle of cough syrup."

Enjoy! -Kev

Twitter at kekline

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Adventures in the Land of CloudDB/NoSQL/NoAcid

Cloud, Bunny, or CloudBunny?

Why Should You Care?