Sqoop graduates from Apache Incubator to a Top Level Project

Sqoop – the Big Data Tool has moved out of the Apache Incubator to a Top Level Project (TLP).  In case you are not aware of Sqoop, it is the key data tool to transfer volumes of data between Hadoop and structured data stores like RDBMS (Relational Database Management Systems).  This project provides connectors for many popular RDBMS – Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, DB2 and PostgreSQL.  This is a significant step towards the adoption of Hadoop in the enterprise solutions.

You can read more on this in the eweek article here. And here is the link for learning more on sqoop: http://sqoop.apache.org/

Excellent Article on the Basics of Hadoop

Read an excellent article at gigaom on Hadoop.  It is true that many people in the industry have heard the word, read about the Big Data and don’t really know what Hadoop is.  This article will give you the basic understanding that you need:

http://gigaom.com/cloud/what-it-really-means-when-someone-says-hadoop/

History of Programming Languages

Nice infographic from Rackspace on the history of programming languages:

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/blog/2011/05/17/infographic-evolution-of-computer-languages/

Google Apps vs Office 365

A nice feature comparison between Google Apps and Office 365:

http://lifehacker.com/5818368/google-apps-v-office-365-feature-showdown-which-should-you-use

Mercury QC Explorer Add-In

Ran into this issue yesterday at a client site so thought about posting it in case any of you run into this.  Accessing Mercury’s QC over IE was working fine till the version of IE was upgraded to IE8.  Post that, accessing QC directly using the IE browser was not working due to security settings and restrictions to use the ActiveX components.  HP has a QC Explorer Add-in which allows you to use QC without a web browser.  You can download it from here:

http://updates.merc-int.com/qualitycenter/qc90/others/qcexplorer/index.html

Post the install, just bring it up, type in the address (for QCBin or SiteAdmin – sabin) in the space above, press Go and you are all set.

List of NoSQL Databases

Here is a good list of the NoSQL databases:

http://nosql-database.org/

Deep Web

Yesterday, while having a discussion with a friend on search engines, the topic of Deep Web was raised. Deep web (or Deepnet) is essentially the part of the internet that is not indexed by the search engines for example the dynamically generated site content. It is an interesting topic – here is the wikipedia link in case you are interested in learning further:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Web

NoSQL Databases making inroads in mobile market as well

Good post by Sean Gallagher on NoSQL databases making inroads into the mobile market – here.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery

These two terms are often used very interchangeably.

High Availability typically refers to the solutions that use fault tolerance and /or load balancing in order to provide high availability of the applications.  HA is essentially the ability to continue operations when a component fails – could be a CPU, memory failure, disk failure, complete failure of a server etc..  With HA, there is usually no loss of service.  Clustering servers together is a form of HA, having redundant power supplies or redundant network controllers is a form of HA, having proper RAID arrays is a form of HA, having proper load balancing in place is a form of HA.  The primary goal of a HA environment is uptime/providing continuous service w/o disruption.

Disaster Recovery provides increased availability.  It is the process/ability to restore operations that are critical for the business to run after a disaster (human induced or natural causes example – power failure in the production site, floods, earthquake, hurricane etc.).  The key difference between DR and HA is that the recovery time taken in the case of DR is typically more than a HA.  With DR, there is a small loss of service while the DR systems are activated and take over the load in the DR site.

Here are some posts/articles which delve into these differences in more detail:

http://www.channeldb2.com/profiles/blogs/disaster-recovery-high

http://nexus.realtimepublishers.com/sgudb.php

http://www.drj.com/2010-articles/online-exclusive/understanding-high-availability-and-disaster-recovery-in-your-overall-recovery-strategy.html

http://gestaltit.com/all/tech/storage/bas/define-high-availability-disaster-recovery/

Excellent post on NoSQL

MVP Michael Otey has a good article in the sqlmag on NoSQL – you can read that here.  Go through the link on the slideshow explaining the rationale of Twitter’s move to NoSQL from MySQL – it’s an excellent presentation.