Big Data Schema Evolution

Posted by & filed under Big Data.

Schema migrations in the relational world are now common practice. The best practices for evolving a database schema are well known, where a migration gets applied before the code that needs to use it is rolled out. If there are any problems, migration can be rolled back. The same practices are not as well established… Read more »

Type All The Things!

Posted by & filed under Big Data, Programming.

Scala is statically typed. Yet we rarely use it to our advantage. For example let’s say you have a function with the signature: def convert(a: Double, b: Double): String Of course, the author hasn’t written a comment, and clearly didn’t expressively label the variables. So lets fix it: def reverseGeocode(latitude: Double, longitude: Double): String The… Read more »

Spark on AWS EMR – The Missing Manual

Posted by & filed under Big Data.

Apache Spark recently received top level support on Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) cloud offering, joining applications such as Hadoop, Hive, Pig, HBase, Presto, and Impala. This is exciting for me, because most of my workloads run on EMR, and utilizing Spark required either standing up manual EC2 clusters, or using EMR bootstrap, which was very… Read more »

Apache Spark on EC2

Posted by & filed under Big Data.

Its easy to get started with Apache Spark. You can get a template for a Scala job using the Typesafe Activator and have it running on a local cluster with a small dataset. You can also use a handy script spark_ec2 to launch an EC2 cluster as detailed in Running Spark on EC2 document. You could… Read more »