Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

April 28, 2013

Introducing Drake, a kind of ‘make for data’

Filed under: Data Streams,Drake,Workflow — Patrick Durusau @ 9:55 am

Introducing Drake, a kind of ‘make for data’ by Aaron Crow.

From the post:

Here at Factual we’ve felt the pain of managing data workflows for a very long time. Here are just a few of the issues:

  • a multitude of steps, with complicated dependencies
  • code and input can change frequently – it’s tiring and error-prone to figure out what needs to be re-built
  • inputs scattered all over (home directories, NFS, HDFS, etc.), tough to maintain, tough to sustain repeatability

Paul Butler, a self-described Data Hacker, recently published an article called “Make for Data Scientists“, which explored the challenges of managing data processing work. Paul went on to explain why GNU Make could be a viable tool for easing this pain. He also pointed out some limitations with Make, for example the assumption that all data is local.

We were gladdened to read Paul’s article, because we’d been hard at work building an internal tool to help manage our data workflows. A defining goal was to end up with a kind of “Make for data”, but targeted squarely at the problems of managing data workflow.

A really nice introduction to Drake, with a simple example and pointers to more complete resources.

Not hard to see how Drake could fit into a topic map authoring work flow.

March 27, 2013

Drake [Data Processing Workflow]

Filed under: Authoring Topic Maps,Drake,Workflow — Patrick Durusau @ 10:15 am

Drake

From the webpage:

Drake is a simple-to-use, extensible, text-based data workflow tool that organizes command execution around data and its dependencies. Data processing steps are defined along with their inputs and outputs and Drake automatically resolves their dependencies and calculates:

  • which commands to execute (based on file timestamps)
  • in what order to execute the commands (based on dependencies)

Drake is similar to GNU Make, but designed especially for data workflow management. It has HDFS support, allows multiple inputs and outputs, and includes a host of features designed to help you bring sanity to your otherwise chaotic data processing workflows.

The video demonstrating Drake is quite good.

Granting my opinion may be influenced by the use of awk in the early examples. 😉

Definitely a tool for scripted production of topic maps.

I first saw this in a tweet by Chris Diehl.

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