Hadoop and Talend Studio

When IT specialists talk about 'big data', they are usually referring to data sets that are so large and complex that they can no longer be processed with conventional data management tools. These huge volumes of data are produced for a variety of reasons. Streams of data can be generated automatically (reports, logs, camera footage, and so on). Or they could be the result of detailed analyses of customer behavior (consumption data), scientific investigations (the Large Hadron Collider is an apt example) or the consolidation of various data sources.

These data repositories, which typically run into petabytes and exabytes, are hard to analyze because conventional database systems simply lack the muscle. Big data has to be analyzed in massively parallel environments where computing power is distributed over thousands of computers and the results are transferred to a central location.

The Hadoop open source platform has emerged as the preferred framework for analyzing big data. This distributed file system splits the information into several data blocks and distributes these blocks across multiple systems in the network (the Hadoop cluster). By distributing computing power, Hadoop also ensures a high degree of availability and redundancy. A 'master node' handles file storage as well as requests.

Hadoop is a very powerful computing platform for working with big data. It can accept external requests, distribute them to individual computers in the cluster and execute them in parallel on the individual nodes. The results are fed back to a central location where they can then be analyzed.

However, to reap the benefits of Hadoop, data analysts need a way to load data into Hadoop and subsequently extract it from this open source system. This is where Talend Studio comes in.

Talend Studio is an easy-to-use graphical development environment that allows for interaction with big data sources and targets without the need to learn and write complicated code. Once a big data connection is configured, the underlying code is automatically generated and can be deployed as a service, executable or stand-alone Job that runs natively on your big data cluster - HDFS, HCatalog, HBase, Sqoop, or Hive.

Talend big data solutions provide comprehensive support for all the major big data platforms. Talend big data components work with leading big data Hadoop distributions, including Cloudera, Greenplum, Hortonworks and MapR. Talend provides out-of-the-box support for a range of big data platforms from the leading appliance vendors including Greenplum, Netezza, Teradata, and Vertica.