Big data case study or use case example - hadoop

I have read lot of blogs\article on how different type of industries are using Big Data Analytic. But most of these article fails to mention
What kinda data these companies used. What was the size of the data
What kinda of tools technologies they used to process the data
What was the problem they were facing and how the insight they got the data helped them to resolve the issue.
How they selected the tool\technology to suit their need.
What kinda pattern they identified from the data & what kind of patterns they were looking from the data.
I wonder if someone can provide me answer to all these questions or a link which at-least answer some of the the questions.
It would be great if someone share how finance industry is making use of Big Data Analytic.

Your question is very large but I will try to answer with my own experience
1 - What kinda data these companies used ?
One of the strength of Hadoop is that you can use a very large origin for your data. It can be .csv / .txt files, json, mysql, photos, videos ...
It can contains data about marketing, social network, server logs ...
What was the size of the data ?
There is no rules about that. It can start from 50 - 60 Go to 1Po. Depends of the data and the company.
2 - What kinda of tools technologies they used to process the data
No rules about that. Depends of the needs. To organize and process data they use Hadoop with Hive and Pig. To query data, they want some short response time so they use NoSQL / in-memory database with a shorter dataset (refined by Hadoop). In some cases, company use ETL like Talend in order to go faster.
3 - What was the problem they were facing and how the insight they got the data helped them to resolve the issue.
The main issue for company is the growth of their data. At a moment, the data are too big and it is impossible to process with traditional tools like Mysql or others. So they start to use Hadoop for example.
4 - How they selected the tool\technology to suit their need.
I think it's an internal problematic. Company choose their tools because of the price of the licence, their own skills, their finals needs ...
5 - What kinda pattern they identified from the data & what kind of patterns they were looking from the data.
I don't really understand this question
Hope it will help you.

I think getting what you want is a difficult job getting data little by little from different resources. just make sure to visit these links:
a bunch of free reports. I am studying the list right now.
http://www.oreilly.com/data/free/
and the famous McKinsey Report:
http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/dotcom/Insights%20and%20pubs/MGI/Research/Technology%20and%20Innovation/Big%20Data/MGI_big_data_full_report.ashx

Related

what after extracting my DATA?

Actually, I have a project to deal with. I'm Asking for help.
My project is in the field of Business intelligence and creating datawarehouses.
I extracted Data that I need (ETL) and then what should I do ?
I am working with MS SQL Server 2014.
How to create my dimensions and my Fact table?
looking for advises
Please do accept my salvation.
This is a big question! Unfortunately, Stack Overflow's Q&A format isn't the best place to answer this. But here are few pointers:
Everything starts with the requirements. Before you write any code, figure out exactly what your data warehouse will be used for (it can also be helpful to work out what your data warehouse will not be used for).
Analyse the raw data. Make sure you know what is and is not available. Be aware of the source systems shortcomings. Example: If your reports need to split your customers by country, is this data available? If so, is it consistently populated (some records have US, others USA, others still America)? Make a plan for dealing with these issues (see data cleansing below).
Prototype your data model. Excel and Power BI are great places to test the design. Once you start using a database it becomes much harder to change. Get it right at the very beginning and your life will be much easier.
Pick an ETL tool. Make sure you understand it, and it plays to the strengths of you and your team. I like SSIS.
Import the raw data into staging tables. This can help to simplify the analysis phase.
Cleanse the data. In a data warehouse, you have 100% control over every row, column and cell. Make use of this fact. Ensure only quality, useful, well-conformed data makes it into your published tables.
Like all projects, planning and administration is the key. Writing code and building tables comes last.
Here are some resources which should help you:
Kimball Group. Ralph Kimball literally wrote the book on data warehousing (see next tip). His company's website contains a few hints and tips.
If you cannot attend a training course, buy a good book. I'd recommend this one. It's a big subject. Blogs and the internet can only teach you so much.
Download and try out Adventure Works DW. This is a sample data warehouse and ETL package, built by Microsoft. It demonstrates some the techniques you can use in SSIS.

Getting into designing dashboards and need some help identifying each technical layer along the way

So I will be embarking on designing a dashboard that will display KPI's and other relevant information for my team. Since I am in the early stages of this project and am not very familiar on the technical process behind designing a dashboard, I need some questions vetted out first before I go and shop for some solutions to avoid reinventing the wheel.
Here are some of my questions:
We want a dashboard that can provide live-time information via our data sources (or as close to live-time as possible). What function allows a dashboard to update itself with concurrent datasources? From a conceptual standpoint, I can understand creating a dashboard out of Microsoft Excel, and having the dashboard dependent on the values you may have set within your pivot table.
How do you make a dashboard request information from multiple datasources on its own? Just like the excel example, a user may have to go into the pivot tables to update values, but I want to know how would a dashboard request this by itself and what is the exact method from a programming standpoint? Does the code execute itself every time you refresh the webpage?
How do you create datasources organically? I know for some solutions such as SharePoint BI Center, there are pre-supported datasources like an excel sheet or SharePoint and it's as easy as uploading your document and letting the design handle the rest. However, there are going to be some datasources that I know that will need to be fetched. Do I need to understand something else like an event recorder in order to navigate this issue?
Introduction
The dashboard (or a report, respectively) is usually the result of a long chain of steps. Very much simplified it could look like this:
src1
|------\
src2 | /---- Dashboards
|------+---[DWH]-[BR]-+
src n | | \---- Reports etc.
|------/ [Big Data]
Keep in mind, this is only a very, very simple structure of a data backend / frontend.
DWH means Data Warehouse, where data might be stored temporarily (you referred to this as fetching). This could be a database, could be a Big Data engine, could be a combination of both...
Afterwards, there are Business Rules (BR). Those might be specific rules in how different departments calculate and relate to data, but also simple things like algebra.
Questions
So, the main question should not be about the technology:
What software should we choose?
How can we create a dashboard?
but on the contrary focused on your business processes (see it like a top-down view):
How does our core process look like? Where would I like to measure data?
How would department a calculate sales in difference to department b? Should all use the same rule?
Where does everyone store the data? Can we access it? Do we need structural data?
And, very easy to forget but also easily sometimes one of the biggest parts: Is the identifier of a business object (say, sales id) everywhere build and formatted in the same way?
Conclusion
When those questions are at least in the back of your head and you keep working in this direction, more or less automatically data will spill out at certain points of that process.
Then it won't matter if you use Excel, a small-to medium app like Tableau, Tibco Spotfire, QlikView, Power BI or you want to go full scale with a big Hadoop backend, databases and JasperReports, Apache Drill, Pentaho, SSIS on top of it... it will come out eventually.
TL;DR
Focus on the processes first. Make sure to understand them. Draft in Excel. Then proceed in getting the data and the tools you need to help your use cases. It will work out much better from a "top-down" approach than trying to solve your requirements with tools only.

Free data warehouse - Infobright, Hadoop/Hive or what?

I need to store large amount of small data objects (millions of rows per month). Once they're saved they wont change. I need to :
store them securely
use them to analysis (mostly time-oriented)
retrieve some raw data occasionally
It would be nice if it could be used with JasperReports or BIRT
My first shot was Infobright Community - just a column-oriented, read-only storing mechanism for MySQL
On the other hand, people says that NoSQL approach could be better. Hadoop+Hive looks promissing, but the documentation looks poor and the version number is less than 1.0 .
I heard about Hypertable, Pentaho, MongoDB ....
Do you have any recommendations ?
(Yes, I found some topics here, but it was year or two ago)
Edit:
Other solutions : MonetDB, InfiniDB, LucidDB - what do you think?
Am having the same problem here and made researches; two types of storages for BI :
column oriented. Free and known : monetDB, LucidDb, Infobright. InfiniDB
Distributed : hTable, Cassandra (also column oriented theoretically)
Document oriented / MongoDb, CouchDB
The answer depends on what you really need :
If your millions of row are loaded at once (nighly batch or so), InfiniDB or other column oriented DB are the best; They have great performance and are "BI oriented". http://www.d1solutions.ch/papers/d1_2010_hauenstein_real_life_performance_database.pdf
And they won't require a setup of "nodes", "sharding" and other stuff that comes with distributed/"NoSQL" DBs.
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/01/07/star-schema-bechmark-infobright-infinidb-and-luciddb/
If the rows are added in real time.. then column oriented DB are bad. You can either choose two have two separate DB (that's my choice : one noSQL for real feeding of the stats by the front, and real time stats. The other DB column-oriented for BI). Or turn towards something that mixes column oriented (for out requests) and distribution (for writes) / like Cassandra.
Document oriented DBs are not suited for BI, they are more useful for CRM/CMS issues where you need frequent access to a particular row
As for the exact choice inside a category, I'm still undecided. Cassandra in distributed, and Monet or InfiniDB for CODB, are leaders. Monet is reported to have problem loading very big tables because it runs indexes in memory.
You could also consider GridSQL. Even for a single server, you can create multiple logical "nodes" to utilize multiple cores when processing queries.
GridSQL uses PostgreSQL, so you can also take advantage of partitioning tables into subtables to evaluate queries faster. You mentioned the data is time-oriented, so that would be a good candidate for creating subtables.
If you're looking for compatibility with reporting tools, something based on MySQL may be your best choice. As for what will work for you, Infobright may work. There are several other solutions as well, however you may want also to look at plain-old MySQL and the Archive table. Each record is compressed and stored and, IIRC, it's designed for your type of workload, however I think Infobright is supposed to get better compression. I haven't really used either, so I'm not sure which will work best for you.
As for the key-value stores (E.g. NoSQL), yes, they can work as well and there are plenty of alternatives out there. I know CouchDB has "views", but I haven't had the opportunity to use any, so I don't know how well any of them work.
My only concern with your data set is that since you mentioned time, you may want to ensure that whatever solution you use will allow you to archive data past a certain time. It's a common data warehouse practice to only keep N months of data online and archive the rest. This is where partitioning, as implemented in an RDBMS, comes in very useful.

Can OLAP be done in BigTable?

In the past I used to build WebAnalytics using OLAP cubes running on MySQL.
Now an OLAP cube the way I used it is simply a large table (ok, it was stored a bit smarter than that) where each row is basically a measurement or and aggregated set of measurements. Each measurement has a bunch of dimensions (i.e. which pagename, useragent, ip, etc.) and a bunch of values (i.e. how many pageviews, how many visitors, etc.).
The queries that you run on a table like this are usually of the form (meta-SQL):
SELECT SUM(hits), SUM(bytes),
FROM MyCube
WHERE date='20090914' and pagename='Homepage' and browser!='googlebot'
GROUP BY hour
So you get the totals for each hour of the selected day with the mentioned filters.
One snag was that these cubes usually meant a full table scan (various reasons) and this meant a practical limitation on the size (in MiB) you could make these things.
I'm currently learning the ins and outs of Hadoop and the likes.
Running the above query as a mapreduce on a BigTable looks easy enough:
Simply make 'hour' the key, filter in the map and reduce by summing the values.
Can you run a query like I showed above (or at least with the same output) on a BigTable kind of system in 'real time' (i.e. via a user interface and the user get's their answer ASAP) instead of batch mode?
If not; what is the appropriate technology to do something like this in the realm of BigTable/Hadoop/HBase/Hive and the likes?
It's even kind of been done (kind of).
LastFm's aggregation/summary engine: http://github.com/zohmg/zohmg
A google search turned up a google code project "mroll" but it doesn't have anything except contact info (no code, nothing). Still, might want to reach out to that guy and see what's up. http://code.google.com/p/mroll/
We managed to create low latency OLAP in HBase by preagragating a SQL query and mapping it into appropriate Hbase qualifiers. For more detail visit below site.
http://soumyajitswain.blogspot.in/2012/10/hbase-low-latency-olap.html
My answer relates to HBase, but applies equally to BigTable.
Urban Airship open-sourced datacube, which I think is close to what you want. See their presentation here.
Adobe also has a couple of presentations (here and here) on how they do "low-latency OLAP" with HBase.
Andrei Dragomir made an interesting talk about how Adobe performs OLAP functionality with M/R and HBase.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U3EnfiKs44
Slides: http://hstack.org/hbasecon-low-latency-olap-with-hbase/
If you are looking for a table-scan approach, have you considered Google BigQuery? BigQuery does automatic scale-out on the back-side that gives interactive response. There is a good session by Jordan Tigani from the 2012 Google I/O event that explains some of the internals.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI8623HlYd4
It's not MapReduce but it is geared towards high-speed table scan like what you described.

Hbase / Hadoop Query Help

I'm working on a project with a friend that will utilize Hbase to store it's data. Are there any good query examples? I seem to be writing a ton of Java code to iterate through lists of RowResult's when, in SQL land, I could write a simple query. Am I missing something? Or is Hbase missing something?
I think you, like many of us, are making the mistake of treating bigtable and HBase like just another RDBMS when it's actually a column-oriented storage model meant for efficiently storing and retrieving large sets of sparse data. This means storing, ideally, many-to-one relationships within a single row, for example. Your queries should return very few rows but contain (potentially) many datapoints.
Perhaps if you told us more about what you were trying to store, we could help you design your schema to match the bigtable/HBase way of doing things.
For a good rundown of what HBase does differently than a "traditional" RDBMS, check out this awesome article: Matching Impedance: When to use HBase by Bryan Duxbury.
If you want to access HBase using a query language and a JDBC driver it is possible. Paul Ambrose has released a library called HBQL at hbql.com that will help you do this. I've used it for a couple of projects and it works well. You obviously won't have access to full SQL, but it does make it a little easier to use.
I looked at Hadoop and Hbase and as Sean said, I soon realised it didn't give me what I actually wanted, which was a clustered JDBC compliant database.
I think you could be better off using something like C-JDBC or HA-JDBC which seem more like what I was was after. (Personally, I haven't got farther with either of these other than reading the documentation so I can't tell which of them is any good, if any.)
I'd recommend taking a look at Apache Hive project, which is similar to HBase (in the sense that it's a distributed database) which implements a SQL-esque language.
Thanks for the reply Sean, and sorry for my late response. I often make the mistake of treating HBase like a RDBMS. So often in fact that I've had to re-write code because of it! It's such a hard thing to unlearn.
Right now we have only 4 tables. Which, in this case, is very few considering my background. I was just hoping to use some RDBMS functionality while mostly sticking to the column-oriented storage model.
Glad to hear you guys are using HBase! I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but here are a couple of things that might help.
HBase is based on / inspired by BigTable, which happens to be exposed by AppEngine as their db api, so browsing their docs should help a great deal if you're working on a webapp.
If you're not working on a webapp, the kind of iterating you're describing is usually handled with via map/reduce (don't emit the values you don't want). Skipping over values using iterators virtually guarantees your application will have bottlenecks with HBase-sized data sets. If you find you're still thinking in SQL, check out cloudera's pig tutorial and hive tutorial.
Basically the whole HBase/SQL mental difference (for non-webapps) boils down to "Send the computation to the data, don't send the data to the computation" -- if you keep that in mind while you're coding you'll do fine :-)
Regards,
David

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