Last week I have a talk at the August HUG meetup on my current favorite topic – using search (or rather, Solr as a NoSQL solution) to improve big data analytics. It’s the same general theme I covered at the Basis Technology conference in June – Hadoop is often used to convert petabytes of data into pie charts, but without the ability to poke at the raw data, it’s often more…

We’re heavy users of the Cascading open source project, which lets us quickly build Hadoop-based workflows to solve custom data processing problems. Concurrent recently posted a Scale Unlimited Case Study that describes how we use Cascading, and the benefits to us (and thus to our customers). They also listed the various Cascading-related open source projects we sponsor, including the Solr scheme that makes it trivial to generate Solr search indexes more…