5 Days of Building, Developing and Managing SQL Server

Workshops, Business Intelligence and Big Data with the Microsoft Stack, For Database Administrators

SQF02 Workshop: Big Data and NoSQL in Microsoft-Land

12/14/2012

8:00AM - 5:00PM

Level: Intermediate

Andrew Brust

Senior Director, Market Strategy and Intelligence

Datameer

Lynn Lagit

Lynn Langit

Data Wrangler

Lynn Langit

There you are, minding your own RDBMS/BI business when along come the phenomena of Big Data and NoSQL, taking the world by storm. But what kind of world is that? With databases that aren’t relational or transactional, a distributed processing engine based on Java, and a zillion open source projects with names like Hadoop, Mongo, Pig and Cassandra, it’s a world that may seem pretty alien. It almost wants to make you keep minding your own business.

You shouldn’t ignore these technologies and the reality is that you don’t have to. While the culture NoSQL and Big Data is different from that of relational and multidimensional technologies, many of the underlying principles and problems are the same. Your RDBMS and BI aptitude has significant value in the NoSQL and Big Data world. To realize that value, you just need an introduction to these technologies given by people with an enterprise data platform sensibility. SQL Server/Microsoft BI/NoSQL/Big Data experts Lynn Langit and Andrew Brust are your humble servants in that very capacity.

In this workshop we’ll discuss what Big Data and NoSQL are all about and we’ll provide practical demos of the relevant technologies. Specifically, we will:

  • Discuss the different types of NoSQL database storage
  • Create databases and run queries against them, using NoSQL products including MongoDB and HBase
  • Explore the world of Big Data and get a sense of what Hadoop and MapReduce are all about
  • Look at Microsoft’s own distribution of Hadoop for Windows Azure, and discuss other Hadoop “distros”
  • Run MapReduce jobs using not only Java, but also JavaScript, Hadoop add-on tools like Hive and Pig, and even good old C#

We’ll finish by reeling things back in to the Microsoft world, and take a look at how tools like Reporting Services, PowerPivot, Power View and even Excel can query Hadoop. We’ll also discuss how SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse Edition fits into the Big Data puzzle. We’ll even discuss how various features of SQL Server and other Microsoft products deliver elements of NoSQL functionality while letting you continue your work with relational technology. At the end of the workshop, you won’t just understand NoSQL and Big Data; you’ll appreciate how they enhance the relational and BI world more than they threaten it, and how you can capitalize on that very synergy.