Bill McColl

Over the past few years, Hadoop has become something of a poster child for the NoSQL movement. Whether it's interpreted as "No SQL" or "Not Only SQL", the message has been clear, if you have big data challenges, then your programming tool of choice should be Hadoop. Sure, continue to use SQL for your ancient legacy stuff, but when you need cutting edge performance and scalability, it's time to go Hadoop. The only problem with this story is that the people who really do have cutting edge performance and scalability requirements today have already moved on from the Hadoop model. A few have moved back to SQL, but the much more significant trend is that, having come to realize the capabilities and limitations of MapReduce and Hadoop, a whole raft of new post-Hadoop architectures are now being developed that are, in most cases, orders of magnitude faster at scale than Ha... (more)

What's Really Industry Changing About Cloud Computing?

Bill McColl's "Cloud N" Blog This is an incredibly important time for the cloud computing area. But let’s try and move the discussion of it in the press along from an obsession with new datacenter buildings located by power stations, with the total server numbers at Microsoft and Google, and with Amazon’s hourly pricing for EC2. Interesting though those aspects of cloud computing appear to be to journalists, they hardly represent what is really industry changing about cloud computing. What are some of the new directions in the massively parallel cloud computing space? I’ll mentio... (more)

Cloud Analytics

Cloud Data Analytics on Ulitzer Cloud analytics is hot. Gartner's top two strategic technologies for the enterprise in 2010 are cloud computing and advanced analytics. In their words "Technologies you can't afford to ignore". Venture capitalist Ann Winblad, in a recent video, points out that the coming era of realtime cloud analytics will have a revolutionary impact on the enterprise, creating a radically new "innovation palette" for businesses of all kinds. Business analytics is, of course, a major established sector of the IT industry, but it's one that's ripe for disruption. T... (more)

Google Dumps MapReduce

Over the past five years, MapReduce and Hadoop have been widely used for processing big data from the web, both in-house and in the cloud. However, we are now in an era where news, search, marketing, commerce and many other key aspects of the web are becoming much more social, more mobile, and more realtime. In response to these changes, major web companies are realizing that the "big data analytics" that is driving many of their services needs to be radically changed in order to move it into this realtime era. No company sees this more clearly than Google, the company that origi... (more)

Cloud Computing for Everyone

Early Bird at CLoud Expo In computing, big revolutions happen whenever a new technology comes along that enables everyone to do something that could previously only be done by a small number of technology experts, or only by those with tons of money and technical talent. Personal computing (Microsoft, Apple), Publishing (Adobe), Search (Google), Video (YouTube), News/Journalism (blogs) are all examples of this kind of disruptive revolutionary change. What's the next big game changer? In a word - Apps! We are about to move to an era in which everyone will be able to build their o... (more)