Tag: Big Data

Google Cloud is finally here

Amazon gets some competition, and customers should see some relief, unless Google withdraws commitment on these products after a few years of trying (like it often does now!)

 

http://cloud.google.com/products/index.html

Machine Type Pricing
Configuration Virtual Cores Memory GCEU * Local disk Price/Hour $/GCEU/hour
n1-standard-1-d 1 3.75GB *** 2.75 420GB *** $0.145 0.053
n1-standard-2-d 2 7.5GB 5.5 870GB $0.29 0.053
n1-standard-4-d 4 15GB 11 1770GB $0.58 0.053
n1-standard-8-d 8 30GB 22 2 x 1770GB $1.16 0.053
Network Pricing
Ingress Free
Egress to the same Zone. Free
Egress to a different Cloud service within the same Region. Free
Egress to a different Zone in the same Region (per GB) $0.01
Egress to a different Region within the US $0.01 ****
Inter-continental Egress At Internet Egress Rate
Internet Egress (Americas/EMEA destination) per GB
0-1 TB in a month $0.12
1-10 TB $0.11
10+ TB $0.08
Internet Egress (APAC destination) per GB
0-1 TB in a month $0.21
1-10 TB $0.18
10+ TB $0.15
Persistent Disk Pricing
Provisioned space $0.10 GB/month
Snapshot storage** $0.125 GB/month
IO Operations $0.10 per million
IP Address Pricing
Static IP address (assigned but unused) $0.01 per hour
Ephemeral IP address (attached to instance) Free
* GCEU is Google Compute Engine Unit — a measure of computational power of our instances based on industry benchmarks; review the GCEU definition for more information
** coming soon
*** 1GB is defined as 2^30 bytes
**** promotional pricing; eventually will be charged at internet download rates

Google Prediction API

Tap into Google’s machine learning algorithms to analyze data and predict future outcomes.

Leverage machine learning without the complexity
Use the familiar RESTful interface
Enter input in any format – numeric or text

Build smart apps

Learn how you can use Prediction API to build customer sentiment analysis, spam detection or document and email classification.

Google Translation API

Use Google Translate API to build multilingual apps and programmatically translate text in your webpage or application.

Translate text into other languages programmatically
Use the familiar RESTful interface
Take advantage of Google’s powerful translation algorithms

Build multilingual apps

Learn how you can use Translate API to build apps that can programmatically translate text in your applications or websites.

Google BigQuery

Analyze Big Data in the cloud using SQL and get real-time business insights in seconds using Google BigQuery. Use a fully-managed data analysis service with no servers to install or maintain.
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Reliable & Secure

Complete peace of mind as your data is automatically replicated across multiple sites and secured using access control lists.
Scale infinitely

You can store up to hundreds of terabytes, paying only for what you use.
Blazing fast

Run ad hoc SQL queries on
multi-terabyte datasets in seconds.

Google App Engine

Create apps on Google’s platform that are easy to manage and scale. Benefit from the same systems and infrastructure that power Google’s applications.

Focus on your apps

Let us worry about the underlying infrastructure and systems.
Scale infinitely

See your applications scale seamlessly from hundreds to millions of users.
Business ready

Premium paid support and 99.95% SLA for business users

Visualizing Bigger Data in R using Tabplot

The amazing tabplot package creates the tableplot feature for visualizing huge chunks of data. This is a great example of creative data visualization that is resource lite and extremely fast in a first look at the data. (note- The tabplot package is being used and table plot function is being used . The TABLEPLOT package is different and is NOT being used here).

library(ggplot2)
data(diamonds)
library(tabplot)
tableplot(diamonds)
system.time(tableplot(diamonds))

visualizing a 50000 row by 10 variable dataset in 0.7 s is fast !!

click on screenshot to see it

and some say R is slow 😉

 

Note I used a free Windows Amazon EC2 Instance for it-

See screenshot for hardware configuration

 

the best thing is there is a handy GTK GUI for this package. You can check it out at

 

 

Protected: Converting SAS language code to Java

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Teradata Analytics

A recent announcement showing Teradata partnering with KXEN and Revolution Analytics for Teradata Analytics.

http://www.teradata.com/News-Releases/2012/Teradata-Expands-Integrated-Analytics-Portfolio/

The Latest in Open Source Emerging Software Technologies
Teradata provides customers with two additional open source technologies – “R” technology from Revolution Analytics for analytics and GeoServer technology for spatial data offered by the OpenGeo organization – both of which are able to leverage the power of Teradata in-database processing for faster, smarter answers to business questions.

In addition to the existing world-class analytic partners, Teradata supports the use of the evolving “R” technology, an open source language for statistical computing and graphics. “R” technology is gaining popularity with data scientists who are exploiting its new and innovative capabilities, which are not readily available. The enhanced “R add-on for Teradata” has a 50 percent performance improvement, it is easier to use, and its capabilities support large data analytics. Users can quickly profile, explore, and analyze larger quantities of data directly in the Teradata Database to deliver faster answers by leveraging embedded analytics.

Teradata has partnered with Revolution Analytics, the leading commercial provider of “R” technology, because of customer interest in high-performing R applications that deliver superior performance for large-scale data. “Our innovative customers understand that big data analytics takes a smart approach to the entire infrastructure and we will enable them to differentiate their business in a cost-effective way,” said David Rich, chief executive officer, Revolution Analytics. “We are excited to partner with Teradata, because we see great affinity between Teradata and Revolution Analytics – we embrace parallel computing and the high performance offered by multi-core and multi-processor hardware.”

and

The Teradata Data Lab empowers business users and leading analytic partners to start building new analytics in less than five minutes, as compared to waiting several weeks for the IT department’s assistance.

“The Data Lab within the Teradata database provides the perfect foundation to enable self-service predictive analytics with KXEN InfiniteInsight,” said John Ball, chief executive officer, KXEN. “Teradata technologies, combined with KXEN’s automated modeling capabilities and in-database scoring, put the power of predictive analytics and data mining directly into the hands of business users. This powerful combination helps our joint customers accelerate insight by delivering top-quality models in orders of magnitude faster than traditional approaches.”

Read more at

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/03/06/4315500/teradata-expands-integrated-analytics.html

Statistical Theory for High Performance Analytics

A thing that strikes me when I was a student of statistics is that most theories of sampling, testing of hypothesis and modeling were built in an age where data was predominantly insufficient, computation was inherently manual and results of tests aimed at large enough differences.

I look now at the explosion of data, at the cloud computing enabled processing power on demand, and competitive dynamics of businesses to venture out my opinion-

1) We now have large , even excess data than we had before for statisticians a generation ago.

2) We now have extremely powerful computing devices, provided we can process our algorithms in parallel.

3) Even a slight uptick in modeling efficiency or mild uptick in business insight can provide huge monetary savings.

Call it High Performance Analytics or Big Data or Cloud Computing- are we sure statisticians are creating enough mathematical theory or are we just taking it easy in our statistics classrooms only to be subjected to something completely different when we hit the analytics workplace.

Do we  need more theorists as well? Is there ANY incentive for corporations with private R and D research teams to share their latest cutting edge theoretical work outside their corporate silo.

 

Related-

“a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems”

Oracle launches its version of R #rstats

From-

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1515738

Integrates R Statistical Programming Language into Oracle Database 11g

News Facts

Oracle today announced the availability of Oracle Advanced Analytics, a new option for Oracle Database 11g that bundles Oracle R Enterprise together with Oracle Data Mining.
Oracle R Enterprise delivers enterprise class performance for users of the R statistical programming language, increasing the scale of data that can be analyzed by orders of magnitude using Oracle Database 11g.
R has attracted over two million users since its introduction in 1995, and Oracle R Enterprise dramatically advances capability for R users. Their existing R development skills, tools, and scripts can now also run transparently, and scale against data stored in Oracle Database 11g.
Customer testing of Oracle R Enterprise for Big Data analytics on Oracle Exadata has shown up to 100x increase in performance in comparison to their current environment.
Oracle Data Mining, now part of Oracle Advanced Analytics, helps enable customers to easily build and deploy predictive analytic applications that help deliver new insights into business performance.
Oracle Advanced Analytics, in conjunction with Oracle Big Data Appliance, Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, delivers the industry’s most integrated and comprehensive platform for Big Data analytics.

Comprehensive In-Database Platform for Advanced Analytics

Oracle Advanced Analytics brings analytic algorithms to data stored in Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Exadata as opposed to the traditional approach of extracting data to laptops or specialized servers.
With Oracle Advanced Analytics, customers have a comprehensive platform for real-time analytic applications that deliver insight into key business subjects such as churn prediction, product recommendations, and fraud alerting.
By providing direct and controlled access to data stored in Oracle Database 11g, customers can accelerate data analyst productivity while maintaining data security throughout the enterprise.
Powered by decades of Oracle Database innovation, Oracle R Enterprise helps enable analysts to run a variety of sophisticated numerical techniques on billion row data sets in a matter of seconds making iterative, speed of thought, and high-quality numerical analysis on Big Data practical.
Oracle R Enterprise drastically reduces the time to deploy models by eliminating the need to translate the models to other languages before they can be deployed in production.
Oracle R Enterprise integrates the extensive set of Oracle Database data mining algorithms, analytics, and access to Oracle OLAP cubes into the R language for transparent use by R users.
Oracle Data Mining provides an extensive set of in-database data mining algorithms that solve a wide range of business problems. These predictive models can be deployed in Oracle Database 11g and use Oracle Exadata Smart Scan to rapidly score huge volumes of data.
The tight integration between R, Oracle Database 11g, and Hadoop enables R users to write one R script that can run in three different environments: a laptop running open source R, Hadoop running with Oracle Big Data Connectors, and Oracle Database 11g.
Oracle provides single vendor support for the entire Big Data platform spanning the hardware stack, operating system, open source R, Oracle R Enterprise and Oracle Database 11g.
To enable easy enterprise-wide Big Data analysis, results from Oracle Advanced Analytics can be viewed from Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine.

Supporting Quotes

“Oracle is committed to meeting the challenges of Big Data analytics. By building upon the analytical depth of Oracle SQL, Oracle Data Mining and the R environment, Oracle is delivering a scalable and secure Big Data platform to help our customers solve the toughest analytics problems,” said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president, Oracle Server Technologies.
“We work with leading edge customers who rely on us to deliver better BI from their Oracle Databases. The new Oracle R Enterprise functionality allows us to perform deep analytics on Big Data stored in Oracle Databases. By leveraging R and its library of open source contributed CRAN packages combined with the power and scalability of Oracle Database 11g, we can now do that,” said Mark Rittman, co-founder, Rittman Mead.
Oracle Advanced Analytics — an option to Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition – extends the database into a comprehensive advanced analytics platform through two major components: Oracle R Enterprise and Oracle Data Mining. With Oracle Advanced Analytics, customers have a comprehensive platform for real-time analytic applications that deliver insight into key business subjects such as churn prediction, product recommendations, and fraud alerting.

Oracle R Enterprise tightly integrates the open source R programming language with the database to further extend the database with Rs library of statistical functionality, and pushes down computations to the database. Oracle R Enterprise dramatically advances the capability for R users, and allows them to use their existing R development skills and tools, and scripts can now also run transparently and scale against data stored in Oracle Database 11g.

Oracle Data Mining provides powerful data mining algorithms that run as native SQL functions for in-database model building and model deployment. It can be accessed through the SQL Developer extension Oracle Data Miner to build, evaluate, share and deploy predictive analytics methodologies. At the same time the high-performance Oracle-specific data mining algorithms are accessible from R.

BENEFITS
  • Scalability—Allows customers to easily scale analytics as data volume increases by bringing the algorithms to where the data resides – in the database
  • Performance—With analytical operations performed in the database, R users can take advantage of the extreme performance of Oracle Exadata
  • Security—Provides data analysts with direct but controlled access to data in Oracle Database 11g, accelerating data analyst productivity while maintaining data security
  • Save Time and Money—Lowers overall TCO for data analysis by eliminating data movement and shortening the time it takes to transform “raw data” into “actionable information”
Oracle R Hadoop Connector Gives R users high performance native access to Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and MapReduce programming framework.
This is a  R package
From the datasheet at

Radoop 0.3 launched- Open Source Graphical Analytics meets Big Data

What is Radoop? Quite possibly an exciting mix of analytics and big data computing

 

http://blog.radoop.eu/?p=12

What is Radoop?

Hadoop is an excellent tool for analyzing large data sets, but it lacks an easy-to-use graphical interface. RapidMiner is an excellent tool for data analytics, but its data size is limited by the memory available, and a single machine is often not enough to run the analyses on time. In this project, we combine the strengths of both projects and provide a RapidMiner extension for editing and running ETL, data analytics and machine learning processes over Hadoop.

We have closely integrated the highly optimized data analytics capabilities of Hive and Mahout, and the user-friendly interface of RapidMiner to form a powerful and easy-to-use data analytics solution for Hadoop.

 

and what’s new

http://blog.radoop.eu/?p=198

Radoop 0.3 released – fully graphical big data analytics

Today, Radoop had a major step forward with its 0.3 release. The new version of the visual big data analytics package adds full support for all major Hadoop distributions used these days: Apache Hadoop 0.20.2, 0.20.203, 1.0 and Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop 3 (CDH3). It also adds support for large clusters by allowing the namenode, the jobtracker and the Hive server to reside on different nodes.

As Radoop’s promise is to make big data analytics easier, the 0.3 release is also focused on improving the user interface. It has an enhanced breakpointing system which allows to investigate intermediate results, and it adds dozens of quick fixes, so common process design mistakes get much easier to solve.

There are many further improvements and fixes, so please consult the release notes for more details. Radoop is in private beta mode, but heading towards a public release in Q2 2012. If you would like to get early access, then please apply at the signup page or describe your use case in email (beta at radoop.eu).

Radoop 0.3 (15 February 2012)

  • Support for Apache Hadoop 0.20.2, 0.20.203, 1.0 and Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop 3 (CDH3) in a single release
  • Support for clusters with separate master nodes (namenode, jobtracker, Hive server)
  • Enhanced breakpointing to evaluate intermediate results
  • Dozens of quick fixes for the most common process design errors
  • Improved process design and error reporting
  • New welcome perspective to help in the first steps
  • Many bugfixes and performance improvements

Radoop 0.2.2 (6 December 2011)

  • More Aggregate functions and distinct option
  • Generate ID operator for convenience
  • Numerous bug fixes and improvements
  • Improved user interface

Radoop 0.2.1 (16 September 2011)

  • Set Role and Data Multiplier operators
  • Management panel for testing Hadoop connections
  • Stability improvements for Hive access
  • Further small bugfixes and improvements

Radoop 0.2 (26 July 2011)

  • Three new algoritms: Fuzzy K-Means, Canopy, and Dirichlet clustering
  • Three new data preprocessing operators: Normalize, Replace, and Replace Missing Values
  • Significant speed improvements in data transmission and interactive analytics
  • Increased stability and speedup for K-Means
  • More flexible settings for Join operations
  • More meaningful error messages
  • Other small bugfixes and improvements

Radoop 0.1 (14 June 2011)

Initial release with 26 operators for data transmission, data preprocessing, and one clustering algorithm.

Note that Rapid Miner also has a great R extension so you can use R, a graphical interface and big data analytics is now easier and more powerful than ever.