If you want to tinker with Big Data, you don’t have to build your own sandbox. A number of vendors, including Hadoop distributors Cloudera and Hortonworks, offer Big Data sandboxes for programmers who want to practice without the infrastructure investment.
This month, a new sandbox has joined the party, and this one comes with a pre-configured virtual Big Data integration environment. That makes sense, given that global integration company Talend is offering this one, called, succinctly enough, Talend Big Data Sandbox.
As you would expect, it’s designed to let users dig in quickly and easily. It also incorporates real-world cases, interactive learning tools and data quality tools for Hadoop, which Talend’s press release says can save developers weeks of time.
The goal is to encourage more data integration developers to explore integration in Hadoop using Talend’s Eclipse-based graphical tools. I suspect many would prefer any graphic tool to programming in MapReduce, which is notoriously painful for coding.
Talend is smartly agnostic in that it lets you download a 30-day trial sandbox with your choice of Hadoop distribution: Hortonworks, Cloudera or MapR.
SnapLogic Elastic Integration Platform Summer 2014 Edition Released
The big trend in integration platforms is to target the so-called “citizen integrators,” which describes users outside of IT who (usually) need to connect in some way to the cloud.
Generally, that’s accomplished by providing connectors or adapters that are basically little bundles of pre-configured integration.
SnapLogic’s recent release of its Elastic Integration Platform reflects this growing use case, according to a recent Programmable Web article. SnapLogic VP of Marketing Darren Cunningham explains that the latest release offers citizen integrators data mapping and pattern recognition tools. It also includes an expression editor, which lets you edit data transformations in Java code. It provides a library of functions and properties, so that’s probably not as difficult as it sounds.
The new release also offers a new online community for Java developers and new connectors available for Google Directory, LinkedIn Concur, Expensify, Xactly and Swagger. It’s worth noting that it also includes updates to a number of important connectors, aka “Snaps,” including Salesforce, SAP, Workday, NetSuite, Twitter, Amazon Redshift and Oracle RDBMS.
The press release has more information, as well as links for downloading the new platform.