Blogs

May 15, 2012 · 6:00 PM

Big Data Analytics with Vertica Systems an HP Company

Organizations of all sizes are generating massive amounts of data that, when analyzed properly, can deliver a true competitive advantage in today's fast-paced business environment. But, in order to take advantage of all this data, you need the right tools to manage and analyze in real time, and at scale.

Learn how Vertica can provide unparalleled performance to:

- Extract value from data at the speed and scale you need to thrive in today's economy
- Deploy an analytics architecture built for today's most demanding, real-time analytic workloads
- Deliver high-speed data transformations to accelerate the loading of your data
- Leverage Big Data Insights to create competitive advantage
- Creating Predictive Models to help save their company millions of dollars

Learn how and why Michael Stonebraker created this game changing technology

Create an agile IT environment that scales, controls risk, and reduces project timelines with the lowest entry cost and total cost of ownership in the industry

Schedule:

6:00 - 6:30 - Pizza, soda and socializing with the other groups meeting at MSB
6:30 - 8:00 - Presentation

Over the last couple of years the database market has exploded with new options, including key value stores, document databases, column stores, map/reduce frameworks and graph databases. Relational products are advancing too, including in-memory options from both commercial vendors and open source projects.

As part of Philly Tech Week, this PhillyDB event will host representatives from several different products and projects in order to help you understand what your choices are, how they work, and what kinds of problems each is best suited for.

Confirmed participants include:

Vertica - an MPP column-store db from Michael Stonebraker
Oracle - the reigning enterprise champ, plus MySQL (and more)
Basho - providers of the powerful, open-source, distributed Riak db
Hortonworks - enterprise-grade Hadoop from core contributors
GT.M - A proven ACID KV/document store from our own back yard
MongoDB - scalable, high-performance, open source NoSQL DB
PostgreSQL - world's most advanced open source database

Register at the PhillyDB site

In part 1 - Intro to SQL - you learned the basics of CRUD:

- Create - put data into tables using INSERT
- Read - access the data in tables using SELECT
- Update - change the data in tables using UPDATE
- Delete - remove the data from tables using DELETE

This gave you an understanding of how to work with databases that other people created. But many of you are working on your own projects, and sometimes have trouble understanding how to create your databases.

So in this meetup we're going to talk about data modeling - how to organize your data and structure the tables that the data will be stored in.

The goal of this meetup is to work our way through several examples, from simple to more complex. We think that you will learn best if these examples are relevant to you. So if you're having trouble figuring out how to start a project - for work, for a non-profit, for a hobby, whatever - let me know via email, and we'll see if we can work that into the agenda

The other day I watched an ODTUG webinar "Thinking Clearly about XML" presented by Marco Gralike. You can view an archived version of the presentation at https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/660686966.

The majority of the presentation discussed how to store the data while retaining its XML structure. Marco discussed various methods, most of which were built using the XMLType container.

Now before I start in here, I want to make it clear that Marco was specifically tasked with covering Oracle's native XML functionality in this presentation. And before he got into the meat of things, he hinted that he would do things differently in his own projects. That said...

XML is used in a lot of different ways - most notably web API output, RSS, even application configuration files.

XML works reasonably well as a transport format - well enough, at least, that most APIs offer it as an option.

But when it comes to your DBMS, XML is a poor choice for data storage.

First of all, query performance is horrendous. In Marco's presentation, the second best performing option took 12 seconds to query an XMLType container populated from a 100MB XML file. (The insert performance is pretty bad, too. But since any given piece of data only gets inserted once, whereas the number of queries against that data is theoretically unlimited, insert performance is of less concern.)

Second, you need to query the data using Xpath or Xquery. Developers have enough trouble writing SQL. They don't need to be burdened with another query language/paradigm.

Third, one of the biggest complaints against XML is its verbosity. Indeed, it is often the case where the XML markup within a file is larger than the data itself - and not just in the trivial case. XML bloat is a significant contributing factor in the growing popularity of JSON as an alternative transport markup. If you've got a lot of data, you're going to end up wasting a lot of disk space storing markup.

10gen has organized a local MongoDB user group, and we're welcoming them to Philly by co-hosting their first meetup.

You can register at the PhillyDB meetup site.

"Shell scripts commonly, if unknowingly, compose five (of six) primitive relational-algebraic operations on these tables: union, difference, projection, selection and renaming:

cat acts like union;
sed and grep act like selection;
cut acts like projection;
awk can perform renaming; and
diff acts (almost) like difference.

Relational algebra (whose sixth primitive operation is Cartesian product) is equivalent to both relational calculus and SQL.

Cartesian product (and equijoin) are not difficult to create in bash."

http://matt.might.net/articles/sql-in-the-shell/

if unknowingly, indeed...

The new year always brings a flurry of activity. Database Month looks especially promising.

The NYC MySQL group is organizing a bunch of presentations, and it looks like they will be streaming all of them live.

PhillyDB has been invited to participate, and we're exploring a couple of topics.

Update: Unfortunately, the timing didn't work out for PhillyDB. We look forward to this being an annual event, and participating next year!

Good presentation on using tcpdump, the Percona Toolkit and gnuplot to detect MySQL performance problems.

Measuring Scalability and Performance with TCP, Baron Schwartz, Percona is archived on AWS.

Much of the presentation was based on a Percona white paper Forecasting MySQL Scalability with the Universal Scalability Law

Don't expect to absorb all of this in the first viewing.

We've pushed a bunch of changes to GroupsFinder.

Event Listings

We're excited to announce that GroupsFinder now also aggregates the events organized by the groups we list. (We list all of the groups out there - independents and mothership groups, as well as those hosted through Meetup, Google groups, etc.)

You can view all upcoming events at any time on the GroupsFinder site. If you live in or near a larger city, you can track upcoming events via email, Twitter and RSS.

Global Listings

Our group (and event) listings have expanded beyond USA/Canada. We now have group listings from 69 countries across the globe. Is your group listed?

We've also upgraded the design, and added a new category for design groups.

Nate Gasser has put together a great set of presentations on "MVC development in PHP and JavaScript", and he has graciously invited us to cohost.

Register at the PhillyDB meetup site.