Level: Intermediate

Andrew Brust

Senior Director, Market Strategy and Intelligence

Datameer

HDInsight is the name of Microsoft's distribution of Apache Hadoop, the essential and defining technology of the Big Data world. HDInsight runs on Windows Server and Windows Azure alike, and yet provides an environment that users of other Hadoop distributions will find familiar and quickly useable.

But what is "Big Data," really? And why in the world would Microsoft embrace Hadoop, an open source technology, written in Java that customarily runs on clusters of Linux servers? In this session, Microsoft BI expert and ZDNet Big Data blogger Andrew Brust will explain what Big Data is all about and how Hadoop works. He will highligt its advantages and disadvantages and introduce you to HDInsight. Andrew will also discuss HDInsight's developer tools, demonstrate relevant Microsoft BI tools and show how they work together. Most importantly, you'll learn how developers with relational database skills can make the jump into this exciting and opportunity-filled area.

You will learn:

• What Big Data really is, in a beyond-the-hype context
• About Microsoft HDInsight, its .NET SDK for Hadoop, and LINQ Provider for Apache Hive
• How Microsoft's newest BI technologies work
• Understand how SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse's PolyBase technology integrates with Hadoop and SQL Server