Neal Waterstreet

Hadoop training Day 3

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Training this week is starting to go by quickly. Today we’ll be covering these topics:

  • Hive programming
  • ngrams
  • HCatalog

Even in a limited testing environment it is easy to see the benefits of Hive. We also looked at a comparison of Hive versus SQL. For a couple of the labs we used ngrams to search email data. Towards the end of the session we discussed HCatalog, which is the central schema repository.

As I mentioned earlier, this week is going by quickly and I know we are just scratching the surface of some of these topics. This class is the same as almost all IT training, there will be a lot of work to do on my own to get the most out of this.

2015 Goals

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Back at it with another beginning of the year goal post. The best part of this kind of post is being able to look back and say “Man, what was I thinking? or “Wow, I really changed direction from where I thought I was going!”. My plan for this year is to make all of my goals for this year quantifiable. We’ll see how it goes…

Blogging: Its number one on my list for a reason. I really want to improve here and I will set the goal pretty high, at least for me.
Goal: 100 posts for 2015

Presentations: I am speaking at a meeting in March (need to finish that up) and planning on submitting to a few SQLSaturdays to see if I can present. I’d also like to present online, maybe to the Healthcare VC.
Goal: 3 presentations total

Books: I’m going to change this up this year and not just set a number, but also add a requirement of writing up a review.
Goal: 5 technical/career related books with reviews

Conference attendance: This one may be tough since attending may be out of my control. I had big plans this year of going to 3, but that won’t be happening.
Goal: 1

SQLSaturday: I went to the very first SQLSaturday and in many ways that was the tipping point for me choosing a career with data. I have not attended nearly as many of these as I intended mainly due to commitments with family. I’m going to make a better effort to attend more this year.
Goal: 3

Certifications: This is one goal where it should be pretty reasonable to make show progress. I am one exam away from MCSE and I need to get that wrapped up. The Tableau Desktop and Hortonworks Certified Apache Hadoop 2.0 Developer certification exams look possible here too. Maybe not both, but I should be able to make one of them happen in 2015.
Goal: 2

Twitter: Hard to set a goal for this one. Do I measure in terms of interaction? Followers? Tweets? Tweeting more will make the other two follow, right? As of now, I have 257 total. Doubling that should not be too difficult.
Goal: 250 tweets for the year

PASS Healthcare Virtual Chapter: This one is especially difficult due to the limited presenters available. We are trying to get some momentum going with the group. If that happens a meeting every other month should be attainable.
Goal: 6 presentations

OK, there there are. Goals always change due to unknown factors and I don’t expect these to be any different. I want to keep up this year and adjust as needed, possibly even adding more depending on what happens.

Hadoop training Day 1

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I decided it is finally time to jump in and start looking at Hadoop. I’d originally scheduled for Windows version of the class, but it was cancelled so I switched to the Apache version. At this point, I really wish I’d kept up with Linux commands…

Some of the topics we have discussed so far:

  • Overall Hadoop architecture
  • HDFS
  • YARN
  • MapReduce
  • Briefly discussed Pig, but will get into that more tomorrow

I’m taking the Hortonworks official training since they are a Microsoft partner. One thing that is a little odd is that I am the only one in my classroom. Everyone else (about 15) are in different cities/offices. I really set up with combination of cameras and WebEx. It seems to work well, at least so far. The learning facilitator is top notch as well. Definitely not his first time teaching the course.

Lots to learn with Hadoop and I am hoping this course will help me get up and running.

2014 Goals: Year End Review

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So, finally ready to discuss my 2014 goals…

Certification
Status: Pass, 1 exam left for MCSE, just need to get it knocked out. I am still prepping for Tableau Desktop and Hortonworks Certified Apache Hadoop 2.0 Developer.

Projects
Status: Pass, Hard to measure, but all projects are in good shape and met all deadlines.

Healthcare VC:
Status: Pass, We had a good run last year and have had a few months off. Jumping back in this month and really need to get it where we want/expect it to be.

SQL Events/Training:
Status: Pass, I attended 1 SQLSaturday (Nashville) and the PASS BA Conference in the spring. Normally, with formal training this year I would say this is a failure, but I was able to learn a lot on my own in many new areas.

Learn something new:
Status: Pass, this started slowly , but I’ve spent most of my time lately with R, Tableau and Hadoop. Still need to look at BIML more.

Blog:
Status: Fail. Not nearly enough posts. I’ll try again in 2015.

Technical Books:
Status: Pass. I lost count of many I read which is a good thing, but need to start doing some reviews of those.

Review Yearly Goals:
Status: Fail. I stopped looking by mid year.

So, not good but not bad either. I had a great year, but really fell short with blogging and speaking. I’m trying to find a better way to quantify my goals for 2015. Maybe I need a Dashboard and Metrics…