Data Engineering
Lots of businesses want to use AI, if they can find the right business case for it. We look at some new and enhanced AWS products which take a low-or-no-code approach to using AI to enhance Business Intelligence tools.
Data Engineering
This blog is about the different types of message you can put on systems like Rabbit MQ and Kafka. It discusses the differences between commands, events, state and gives a few tips around how to structure your messages.
Data Engineering
We look at what has changed between Apache Spark 2.4.x and 3.5.1, describing some of the new functionality and the significant boost in performance .
Podcast
In this episode, Oliver Cronk, Andrew Carr and David Hope talk about the ever-changing world of data, with conversations moving from data warehouse to data lake, and data mesh to data fabric. They discuss the importance of data ownership and common tooling, and their view that data mesh is an approach rather than an architecture.
Data Engineering
A comparative analysis of three leading Business Intelligence Tools, Microsoft Power BI, Amazon Quicksight and Tableau. We focus on cloud platform usage, and are interested in functionality and ease of use by novice BI users.
Data Engineering
This blog discusses the different ways we might choose to distribute data between services including queues and distributed log technologies and their relative strengths and weaknesses
Data Engineering
This blog discusses the different data requirements that exist in a typical organisation and provides some suggestions over how to classify them and match them to technologies
Tech
Understand how Google and other search engines use LLMs to gain insights into the semantic meaning of the language in search queries using embedding and cosine similarity.
Data Engineering
The pandemic response required a remarkable level of collaboration between and beyond government departments. In this blog post, I’m going to look at the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service, outlining the different areas of collaboration upon which the service depended, and reflecting on the lessons that government can take forward to achieve its vision of a responsible, efficient and effective data ecosystem.
Data Engineering
Data-literate leadership underpinned the most successful pandemic-response programmes. In this post, I explore what data-literate leadership looks like, drawing on examples from the roundtables on data sharing in government that the Institute for Government ran in partnership with Scott Logic.
Data Engineering
A few years ago while working on a digital product in a government department, my team learnt a valuable lesson: rules can help you go faster. In this post, I explain the positive difference that regulatory and legislative frameworks can make to the design and delivery of digital services, with some examples from the government's response to the pandemic.
Data Engineering
Over the summer, in partnership with Scott Logic, the Institute for Government (IfG) ran a series of roundtable discussions with senior civil servants and government experts on the topic of Data Sharing in Government. This is the first in a series of blog posts in which I'll share some reflections on key themes that arose.
Data Engineering
As a keen amateur runner that somehow found themselves with a qualifying time to stand on the start line of the Great North Run with the Elite women, I take a look at the main ways data has aided my journey to that start line.
Data Engineering
Highlights from one day training course on performance tuning with Apache Spark. Delving into the five most common reasons for poor performance.
Data Engineering
The UK Government has an ambitious data strategy that aims to encourage and facilitate data sharing between departments and businesses. Elements of the strategy appear relatively straightforward, but how will the government fully realise the potential, and align citizens with this bold new approach?
Data Engineering
Organisations across the globe have been on a journey to find the optimal approach for managing and leveraging analytics data. In this post, I’ll set out each of the key milestones on the journey, to arrive at the latest milestone – the Data Mesh paradigm – and ask whether it is really a thing.
Data Engineering
This blog is about tools that help address the challenge of testing systems which handle large data volumes. We’ll see why creating a large, realistic and valid test data set is hard, how test data generators can help, and compare some of those available.
Data Engineering
Create your own Elasticsearch cluster in cloud in next to no time. Leverage ElasticHQ and CloudWatch logging to gain transparency. Excerpts from a client project.
Data Engineering
What started as one faulty gas reading in the summer of 2017, ended up as a series of wasted calls where my bill kept getting higher and higher until it reached £11k. How could this have been handled faster and left me without considering moving energy provider.
Data Engineering
Distributed stream processing engines have been on the rise in the last few years, first Hadoop became popular as a batch processing engine, then focus shifted towards stream processing engines. Stream processing engines can make the job of processing data that comes in via a stream easier than ever before.
Data Engineering
Distributed log technologies have matured in the last few years. In this article, I review the attributes of distributed log technologies, compare four of the most popular and suggest how to choose the one that's right for you.
Data Engineering
Apache Spark is the major talking point in Big Data pipelines, boasting performance 10-100x faster than comparable tools. But how achievable are these speeds and what can you do to avoid memory errors?
In this blog I will use a real example to introduce two mechanisms of data movement within Spark and demonstrate how they form the cornerstone of performance.
Data Engineering
Spark is well known in Big Data for its incredible performance and expressive API. However, it just takes one small misstep to transform a massively parallel powerhouse into a pathetically poor performer. This post presents an example and the steps that can be taken to indentify the problem.
Data Engineering
In this quick look at the R language and tools I'll look briefly at the syntax of the language and have a go at creating a few charts with a data set.
Data Engineering
Apache Kafka provides distributed log store used by increasing numbers of companies and often forming the heart of systems processing huge amounts of data. This post shows how to use it for storing meteorological data and displaying this in a graphical dashboard with Graphite and Grafana
Data Engineering
A discussion about Cassandra consistency levels and replication factor, which are frequently misunderstood. This post explains the Cassandra infrastructure and how its configuration can be tuned.
Data Engineering
Lichess makes over 100GB of chess games from 2017 available on their website. This post shows how this data can be transformed with Apache Spark and analysed. Something for Data Engineers and Chess Enthusiasts alike!
Data Engineering
Yesterday the Financial Times boldly declared that BP saved $7bn since 2014 by investing in Big Data technologies. I spent a couple of hours researching Big Data technologies associated with BP members of staff to try and build up a picture of exactly which technologies they are using.
Data Engineering
Using microservices in your architecture is a very popular choice. Unfortunately it is also challenging to get it right. With the help of Twelve-Factor methodology, I will tell you how to set yourself up for a success rather than a disappointment.
Data Engineering
A successful attempt of load testing Alteryx API with Gatling and a not-so-successful attempt with Apache JMeter
Data Engineering
In this post we compare how Cassandra and MariaDB can be configured to operate in clusters and how this affects response time for queries. We found Cassandra to scale well and to be highly configurable. MariaDB can be used with Galera Cluster but it does not provide horizontal scaling. Also NDB can be used to scale MySQL but it was not as configurable as Cassandra.
Data Engineering
We've been comparing Cassandra and MariaDB in single node setups, exploring the issues of each in terms of performance and ease of use from a development perspective. In this article we explore the issues at play in such a setup such as the differences in queries, speed of response and the features that seperate these two technologies.
Data Engineering
StreamSets Data Collector (SDC) is an open source tool for stream-based extracting, transforming and loading large quantities of data. It provides an easy to use UI on top of the underlying processing power of YARN and Spark Streaming with a large number of installable integrations with source and destination systems.
Data Engineering
With the advent of the Internet of Things, the world of Big Data couldn't be more relevant. This post gives an overview of technologies that achieve processing at scale and in real time.
Data Engineering
Big Data can help businesses run more efficiently. Their main challenge is getting the best value from the data they have to turn it into actionable information
Data Engineering
The popularity of Spring Boot in the Java world is undeniable. In this post I will show you yet another reason for this. Using Spring Boot makes working with MongoDB an absolute pleasure.
Data Engineering
In this post I describe how to use Elastic's Rally to generate benchmarks for your private Elasticsearch queries and clusters. I'll be creating a benchmark which allows comparison of an unscored query with one where scoring is enabled.
Data Engineering
This post demonstrates how Docker 1.12 swarm mode round robins the containers in a service both for incoming connections (ingress) and DNS within the swarm.
Data Engineering
For the last few months we've been working on a very DevOps focused project. As such we've used AWS, infrastructure as code, Docker and microservices. The different microservices were initially running all on one box, each with a different port. This solution wasn't scalable or very practical. We couldn't have all our services on one machine and it was getting tiresome and error prone having to remember/lookup which port each service was on. We needed our services to run on separate machines, and we needed a way to communicate with them without having to hard-code IP addresses or port numbers. What we needed was service discovery. As we had already been using Docker for each service, Docker Swarm was a natural candidate.
Data Engineering
This is the second blog post orientated around Bitcoin and its inner workings. The first post took the blockchain and broke down the algorithms which create the fundamental structure of any cryptocurrency. The post was separated into two sections; the first focusing on the block header and the second focusing on the construction of a transaction. If you are not comfortable with how the blockchain works, I suggest you read the first blog post before continuing.
Data Engineering
In most microservice architectures, there are many opportunities and temptations for sharing code. In this post I will give advice based on my experience on when it should be avoided and when code reuse is acceptable. The points will be illustrated with the help of an example Spring Boot project.
Data Engineering
This post uses Docker Compose to spin up a three container HTTP server. One container services the HTTP requests and delegates work to two other containers in a load-balanced way. Erlang is used for development to add a bit of extra challenge!
Data Engineering
Apache Spark has quickly become the largest open source project in big data, but why has it suddenly got so much momentum behind it?
Data Engineering
Big data is one of those buzz phrases that gets thrown round a lot, companies love saying they work with ‘Big’ data, but what is ‘Big’ data?
Data Engineering
Welcome to my blog, Andrew's thoughts on Big Data. This page gives a little background on myself and the blog.
Data Engineering
This post demonstrates how to create an efficient stock ticker app using HTML5 WebSockets and a Haskell server.
Data Engineering
Sharded clusters enable the data persistence layer in MongoDB to be shared across several machines. In this post, we will look at the key considerations you should make before you use sharded clusters.
Data Engineering
Big Data is a hot topic these days, and one aspect of that problem space is
processing streams of high velocity data in near-real time. Here we're going
to look at using Big Data-style techniques in Scala on a stream of data from
a WebSocket.
Data Engineering
With non-relational database implementations (key-store, graph, etc.) entering the mainstream, the necessity has arisen to synchronise relational databases to their non-relational cousins.