Recent Articles

All Data Marketplace Flexter FlowHigh JSON Snowflake XML
Big Data,

Self-Service Analytics in the Data Lake

Deriving Value from your data... We all know that decision makers and analysts need quick access to all of the structured and unstructured data in an enterprise. Typically this data…
fsd_admin July 23, 2015
analytic functions,

Window Functions (aka Analytic Functions) in Spark.

As of Spark 1.4.0 we now have support for window functions (aka analytic functions) in SparkSQL. At Sonra we are heavy users of SparkSQL to handle data transformations for structured…
Uli Bethke July 3, 2015
Big Data,

Sonra and Hostelworld at Big Data Everywhere

We were over in London last week for Big Data Everywhere. Silviu Preoteasa from Hostelworld presented our successful implementation of MapR on Supermicro at Hostelworld. Apologies for the poor quality of…
Uli Bethke June 8, 2015
Big Data,

Multiple Spark Worker Instances on a single Node. Why more of less is more than less.

If you are running Spark in standalone mode on memory rich nodes it can be beneficial to have multiple worker instances on the same node as a very large heap…
Uli Bethke June 3, 2015
Big Data,

In-memory analytics with Tableau, SparkSQL, and MapR

Last week Tableau released version 9.0 of their data visualisation tool. From a Big Data point of view the nicest new feature was support for querying cached (in-memory) SchemaRDDs (Data…
Uli Bethke April 16, 2015
Big Data,

Big Data Made Easy. The Sonra Hadoop Quick Start Appliance

Big Data: Huge cost savings and revenue opportunities, but daunting Hadoop is a core component of the modern data platform. It is not only up to 25 times less expensive…
Uli Bethke March 12, 2015