Many organizations are in the phase of evaluating the Hadoop platform . Certainly Hadoop has been the only option to handle large unstructured data for organizations that run their business handling unstructured data like Google, Yahoo. For others Hadoop positively provides an opportunity to look at data (Dark Data) which they haven’t considered as part of the Enterprise Data Warehouse.
In the process of defining and executing a proof of concept with Hadoop platform, we generally face two challenges which are:
- The need for developers to acquire new skills to handle different programming languages related to Hadoop. It’s not easy for a developer who has worked on a GUI based ETL tool like Informatica to work on Hadoop ETL process.
- The means to visualize the results from Hadoop, definitely we need outputs which are more than a search engine output
2012 can be seen as the year which brought in lot more tools and utilities related to Hadoop to make things easier…following are the few key releases from major BI vendors
- IBM moved up a level and announced on the availability of few integrations which will increase the adoption of BigInsights platform. Some of them include integration of InfoSphere Data Explorer ( recently acquired product Vivisimo) with BigInsights , availability of Applications Accelerators with the BigInsights platform – Machine Data Analytics Accelerator for analyzing machine data and Social Data Analytics Accelerator for analyzing social media data sources like Twitter, Facebook and integration of Cognos with BIgInsights
- SAP got its complete suite of BI stack HANA, Business Objects, Sybase IQ and Data Integrator supporting integration with Hadoop environment there by giving options for easier data integration and visualization for SAP BI customers with Hadoop infrastructure.
- Oracle’s Big Data Appliance based on Cloudera was launched in the start of the year, this also included a NoSQL database, an upgrade was released recently in Dec. Endeca an acquisition Oracle made in 2011 is a visualization platform integrated with Hadoop.
- Microsoft released previews for availability of Hadoop solutions on Windows Server , with Windows support things will become much easier and the adoption rate will increase much faster.
- Informatica launched PowerCenter Big Data Edition which comes with pre built data transformations for Hadoop platform and eliminates hand coding of Java MapReduce programs. Probably the first data integration platform which got into Hadoop integration much earlier.
