TDWI | Training & Research | Business Intelligence, Analytics, Big Data, Data Warehousing

No-Cost MapReduce Development Environment Eases Rich Analytic Application Development

Developers can create advanced SQL-MapReduce analytic applications in less than an hour with downloadable Aster Data Developer Express Visual IDE

• August 16, 2010

Aster Data announced that Aster Data Developer Express, a point-and-click visual development environment introduced earlier this year, is now available for fre download.

Aster Data Developer Express is an integrated development environment (IDE) that significantly eases the development and deployment of MapReduce-enabled analytic applications. The IDE helps developers and analysts build, test, and (with one click) deploy rich analytic applications that leverage large volumes of data. Now, any developer or analyst familiar with the Java programming language can complete a rich analytic application in under an hour using the Aster Data Developer Express environment in Eclipse. Aster Data Developer Express delivers both rapid development and local testing of advanced analytic applications for any project, regardless of size.

Much of the MapReduce coding, including programming concepts such as parallelization and distributed data analysis, is addressed by the IDE without the developer or analyst needing to have expertise in these areas. This simplification makes it much easier for developers to be successful quickly and eliminates the need for deep knowledge of the MapReduce parallel processing framework.

Applications can be validated locally on the desktop or ultimately within Aster Data nCluster, a massive parallel processing (MPP) database with a fully integrated analytics engine that is powered by MapReduce -- known as a data-analytics server.

Rich analytic applications that can be easily built with Aster Data’s downloadable IDE include:

• Iterative Analytics: Uncovering critical business patterns in your data requires hypothesis-driven, iterative analysis. This class of applications is defined by the exploratory navigation of massive volumes of data in a top-down, deductive manner. Aster Data’s IDE makes this easy to develop and to validate the algorithms and functions required to deliver these advanced analytic applications.

• Prediction and Optimization: For this class of application, the process is inductive. Rather than starting with a hypothesis, developers and analysts can build analytic applications that discover the trends, patterns, and outliers in data sets. Examples include propensity to churn in telecommunications, proactive product and service recommendations in retail, and pricing and retention strategies in financial services.

• Ad Hoc Analysis: Examples of ad hoc analysis that can be performed includes social network analysis, advanced click stream analysis, graph analysis, cluster analysis, and a wide variety of mathematical, trigonometric, and statistical functions.

Richer analytics on big data volumes is the new competitive frontier. Organizations have always generated reports to guide their decision-making. Although reports are important, they are historical sets of information generally arranged around predefined metrics and generated on a periodic basis.

Advanced analytics begins where reporting leaves off. Reporting often answers historical questions such as “what happened?” However, analytics addresses “why it happened” and, increasingly, “what will happen next?” To that end, solutions such as Aster Data Developer Express simplify development of powerful ad hoc, predictive analytics and enables analysts to quickly and deeply explore terabytes to petabytes of data.

The Aster Data Developer Express download includes the visual IDE and Eclipse-plug in, sample applications and tutorials, as well as videos that demonstrate the power and ease of development.

Aster Data Developer Express IDE can be downloaded immediately from http://www.asterdata.com/download_developer_express/.