by Angela Guess
Derrick Harris of GigaOM reports that Infochimps has released version 1.1 of its real-time data platform. He writes, “Infochimps, the Austin, Texas-based startup that transitioned in February from a data marketplace into a big data platform, has stepped up its abilities to handle streaming data. On Tuesday, it unveiled the Infochimps Platform 1.1, which improves the platform’s real-time analytics engine and turns its Wukong command line interface into a tool for writing scripts that can process streaming data. The company has described its cloud platform as Heroku for Hadoop — although that characterization is becoming antiquated. While Hadoop is certainly an important part of the Infochimps stack, it’s actually not the focal point. ‘Usually, people come to us because they have a big data problem and heard they should look at Hadoop,’ Infochimps CEO Joe Kelly told me, but they end up accomplishing a lot before they ever turn to Hadoop.”
Harris goes on, “What often happens, Infochimps Chief Strategy Officer Dhruv Bansal said, is customers use the platform to build applications that can ingest, process and analyze data, only turning to Hadoop when they get to the point where they actually need to batch analyze large volumes of data. It’s this experience, he said, that led to the focus on the real-time features in the new release. The new streaming analytics engine, called Data Delivery Service, is based on Apache Flume and lets Infochimps users process data as it flows into their systems. Using Wukong, a Ruby-based command line interface, developers can write big data applications that take advantage of Data Delivery Service, or Hadoop, using a simple grammar that doesn’t involve learning MapReduce or how to work with Flume.”
photo credit: Infochimps
