The previous post [on Colm's blog] covered how to install the Apache Ranger Admin service. The Apache Ranger Admin UI supports creating authorization policies for various Big Data components, by giving users and/or groups permissions on resources. This means that we need to import users/groups into the Apache Ranger Adm...

As I have been building analytics competencies and platforms with customers, I am continuously running into the same type of questions and desires and they center around a critical, but poorly understood topic; Master Data Management or MDM. I thought that it was time I got a couple of thoughts on this topic out so others might benefit from what I have seen so far. What is Mast...

It has been a year since I had a chance to talk about Practical JOSE in Apache CXF at Apache Con NA 2015. We have significantly improved CXF JOSE implementation  since then, with...

As Talend has released its newest version of Talend Data Fabric 6.2.1 for GA, I thought this would be a good time to talk about software upgrades within the Enterprise. Software maintenance is a big part of IT budgets. As more companies offer software for all kinds of needs from instant messa...

Data is a critical competitive factor and is becoming more and more crucial for achieving success. In theory, hardly anyone disputes this to any extent. But in practice there are some very different levels of maturity when it comes to handling data. Based on practical experience gained in medium-sized companies in particular, I would like to try to describe five typical levels of maturity. This is intended to provide a helping hand on the way to becomi...

With the continued growth in Cloud computing, more and more organizations are moving their data to Software as a Service (SaaS) providers such as Salesforce. If you're about to embark on a Data Migration or Data Integration project, and you're used to working with a traditional relational database that sits in your own data center, you may be in for a few surprises. I have worked with Salesforce and a number of other SaaS providers for...

It’s widely understood that our world is becoming digital—consumers, business workers and leaders alike want information and services to be delivered ‘as they like, when and wherever they want.’  In order to meet this demand, the companies need to become more data-driven—using enterprise information to make educated decisions—in order to increase customer service and overall competitive advantage. However,...

With the Euro 2016 tournament now drawing to a close, and having two kids of my own in a competitive soccer league, even a French husband; I now live and breathe football (or soccer depending on your frame of reference) almost every single day. Soccer, much like today’s businesses, has begun to embrace the world of big data. The key method of judging how well a player or team will perform throughout the course of a game or even throughout the season is beginning to sh...

Engineering a big data ingestion pipeline is complicated – if you don’t have the right tools. All data, be it big, little, dark, structured, or unstructured, must be ingested, cleansed, and transformed before insights can be gleaned, a base tenet of the  analytics pr...

  According to a University of Southern California study, less than a decade ago, overall digital information located on storage devices, for the entire world, reached 300 Exabyte. To figure out what it’s like, just imagine that it would require over 400 billion CD-ROMs. If you were to build a stack with it, you would go over...