INTRODUCING KILLRANSWERS
The last few months have been a non stop whirlwind of traveling and speaking. I’ve been very fortunate to have spoken at Strata New York, give a couple sessions at the Cassandra Summit, and even had a few minutes on stage for the Cassandra Summit keynote (I’m at minute 22 with Luke Tillman). When I have time, I end up hacking on random projects. For example, a couple months ago I was...
MIGRATING FROM MYSQL TO CASSANDRA USING SPARK
MySQL is a popular choice for new projects. It’s a flexible database that’s easy to set up and start querying. There’s loads of documentation, examples and frameworks it works with, such as Wordpress, Pandas, Ruby on Rails, and Django. From the above paragraph it reads like a pretty fantastic database, and at small scale it can be great. The problem arises when you need to scale...
CASSANDRA + PYSPARK DATAFRAMES REVISTED
A little while back I wrote a post on working with DataFrames from PySpark, using Cassandra as a data source. DataFrames are, in my opinion, a fantastic, flexible api that makes Spark roughly 14 orders of magnitude nicer to work with as opposed to RDDs. When I wrote the original blog post, the only way to work with DataFrames from PySpark was to get an RDD and call toDF(). Sound freaking amazing -...
JOINING DATAFRAMES WITH PANDAS
In this post I’ll walk through the process of reading in various plain text database files using Pandas, and then joining together the different DataFrames. All my work was done through an IPython notebook. I decided to mess around with the labor statistics database that’s up on Amazon. My end goal was to save all the relevant information into Cassandra for future analysis with...
YOU'RE ALREADY EVENTUALLY CONSISTENT
New people to Apache Cassandra are often concerned about the phrase “eventual consistency.” It’s one of those things that seems so foreign, especially if you’re coming from a relational database. When I am with with my RDBMS I get wrapped in the sweet cocoon of ACID transactions! Is the entire system really safe though? Are we perfectly ACID throughout our entire...
SPARK STREAMING WITH PYTHON AND KAFKA
Last week I wrote about using PySpark with Cassandra, showing how we can take tables out of Cassandra and easily apply arbitrary filters using DataFrames. This is great if you want to do exploratory work or operate on large datasets. What if you’re interested in ingesting lots of data and getting near real time feedback into your application? Enter Spark Streaming. Spark streaming is the...
ON THE BLEEDING EDGE - PYSPARK, DATAFRAMES, AND CASSANDRA
A few months ago I wrote a post on Getting Started with Cassandra and Spark. I’ve worked with Pandas for some small personal projects and found it very useful. The key feature is the data frame, which comes from R. Data Frames are new in Spark 1.3 and was covered in this blog post. Till now I’ve had to write Scala in order to use Spark. This has resulted in me spending a lot of time...
HANGOUT ANNOUNCEMENT - PYTHON PERFORMANCE PROFILING
Just wanted to let everyone know I’m going to be doing a Google Hangout on Air on Thursday, 2pm PT / 5PM ET on Python Performance Profiling. I’m going to be covering several tools and exposing a variety of ways of understanding your applications. You can RSVP on the event page. I’ll be answering Q&A along the way so be sure to have your questions ready and upvote the ones you...
INTRODUCTION TO SPARK & CASSANDRA
I’ve been messing with Apache Spark quite a bit lately. If you aren’t familiar, Spark is a general purpose engine for large scale data processing. Initially it comes across as simply a replacement for Hadoop, but that would be selling it short. Big time. In addition to bulk processing (goodbye MapReduce!), Spark includes: SQL engine Stream processing via Kafka, Flume, ZeroMQ Machine...
DIAGNOSING PROBLEMS IN PRODUCTION WEBINAR POSTED
The webinar from Nov 18, Diagnosing Problems in Production, has been posted to YouTube. I’ve embedded it at the bottom of this post. The webinar is an extended version of the talk I gave at the Cassandra Summit with Blake Eggleston, which I recapped in my blog as well. I had almost double the time to talk in the webinar and so I was able to go into more detail