Last Thursday, the Big Data community of Berlin came together in the aptly named Innospace (Innovation Space) for Big Data, Berlin. Over 350 people attended, providing an incredible cross-section of business and data science interests from Europe’s Silicon Valley. The venue — which usually caters to a max audience of

The importance of cyber security is no secret to anyone who watches the nightly news. Senior executives at businesses of all sizes understand that the global economy is still not adequately protected against cyber-attacks, despite years of effort and annual spending in the multi-billion dollar range. Until recently, CEOs received

In previous posts Distributed NoSQL: HBase and Accumulo and Distributed NoSQL: Riak, we explored two very different designs of key-value pair databases. In this post we will learn about Apache Cassandra, a hybrid of BigTable’s data model and Dynamo’s system design. With BigTable-like column/column family in mind, Cassandra provides a

This week saw several huge funding announcements in the big data sphere. Israeli cyber security startup GuardiCore raised $11 million to bolster data centre security; Everstring landed $12 million to enlist more data scientists; Nervana raised $1.1 million for their deep learning hardware venture, which remains shrouded in mystery. See

In previous post Distributed NoSQL: HBase and Accumulo, we explored two BigTable-like open source solutions. In this post we will learn about Riak, a highly available key-value store modeled after Amazon.com’s Dynamo. As we know, HBase and Accumulo provide strong consistency as a region/tablet is served by only one RegionServer/TabletServer at a time. However, this

We recently caught up with Kevin Wong, a business intelligence professional and machine learning enthusiast, to talk about his latest project: Building a better recommender system for Steam. For anyone who isn’t familiar, Steam is a digital distribution platform for games, developed by Valve Corporation. It boasts over 75 million

NoSQL (Not Only SQL) database, departing from relational model, is a hot term nowadays although the name is kind of misleading. The data model (e.g., key-value, document, or graph) is surely very different from the tabular relations in the RDBMS. However, these non-relational data models are actually not new. For

This week has seen many announcements in the data science arena that will make our lives a little easier. The new CoLaborate app lets data scientists collaborate via Google Drive; Facebook is making its security better than ever; guest contributor Rick Delgado walked us through how five companies are using

We have explored several interesting distributed key-value databases including HBase and Accumulo, Riak, and Cassandra. Although key-value pairs are very flexible, it is tedious to map them to objects in applications. In this post we will learn about a popular document-oriented database MongoDB. MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas, making the integration of data in