Visualizing Big Data: Actuate, Hortonworks and BIRT
From the post:
Challenge
Hadoop stores data in key-value pairs. While the raw data is accessible to view, to be usable it needs to be presented in a more intuitive visualization format that will allow users to glean insights at a glance. While a business analytics tool can help business users gather those insights, to do so effectively requires a robust platform that can:
- Work with expansive volumes of data
- Offer standard and advanced visualizations, which can be delivered as reports, dashboards or scorecards
- Be scalable to deliver these visualizations to a large number of users
Solution
When paired with Hortonworks, Actuate adds data visualization support for the Hadoop platform, using Hive queries to access data from Hortonworks. Actuate’s commercial product suite – built on open source Eclipse BIRT – extracts data from Hadoop, pulling data sets into interactive BIRT charts, dashboards and scorecards, allowing users to view and analyze data (see diagram below). With Actuate’s familiar approach to presenting information in easily modified charts and graphs, users can quickly identify patterns, resolve business issues and discover opportunities through personalized insights. This is further enhanced by Actuate’s inherent ability to combine Hadoop data with more traditional data sources in a single visualization screen or dashboard.
A BIRT/Hortonworks “Sandbox” for both the Eclipse open source and commercial versions of BIRT is now available. As a full HDP environment on a virtual machine, the Sandbox allows users to start benefiting quickly from Hortonworks’ distribution of Hadoop with BIRT functionality.
If you know about “big data” you should be familiar with the Hortonworks Sandbox.
Sandbox is a personal, portable Hadoop environment that comes with a dozen interactive Hadoop tutorials. Sandbox includes many of the most exciting developments from the latest HDP distribution, packaged up in a virtual environment that you can get up and running in 15 minutes!
What you may not know is that Hortonworks partners are creating additional tutorials based on the sandbox.
I count seven (7) to date and more are coming.
The Sandbox may become the default instructional tool for Hadoop.
That would be a benefit to all users, whatever the particulars of their environments.