DB2 Express-C is a free database. It’s fairly straightforward to install on your own machine or deploy on a public cloud like Amazon EC2 or IBM SmartCloud Enterprise. Disclaimer: I’m the guy who puts together the DB2 virtual images for SCE.

DB2 University is a good place to learn how to use DB2 at your own pace.

SSH

Attendees will be provided with access to machines running Hadoop in a cloud environment. The necessary SSH credentials will be provided in class.

Materials

• Hadoop Slides 1.0 – Welcome
• Hadoop Slides 1.1 – What is big data?
• Hadoop Slides 1.2 – What is Hadoop?
• Hadoop Slides 1.3 – Working with BigInsights
• Hadoop Lab 0 – Basic Instructions
• Hadoop Slides 1.4 – Hadoop Architecture and HDFS
• Hadoop Lab 1 – HDFS
• Hadoop Slides 1.5 – MapReduce
• Hadoop Slides 1.6 – BigInsights Web Console
• Hadoop Lab 2 – MapReduce
• Hadoop Slides 1.7 – Pig, Hive, and JAQL
• Hadoop Lab 3 – Pig, Hive, and JAQL
• Hadoop Slides 1.8 – Next Steps

1. Your machine needs to be able to ping itself. If it can’t ping itself, it can’t DB2 itself either.
2. The output of hostname, db2set -all, and cat /home/db2inst1/sqllib/db2nodes.cfg needs to match.

If your machine can’t ping itself, cat /etc/hosts. Chances are, you need to add a line like the following:

127.0.0.1 myhostname.mydomain myhostname

If DB2SYSTEM is set to the wrong value, db2set -g DB2SYSTEM=`hostname` will fix it on Linux.

If db2nodes.cfg has the wrong value, overwrite it with the right one.

The workshop will be an all day hands-on introduction to Hadoop, HDFS, MapReduce, Hive, and JAQL. The plan is to have ready Hadoop clusters running in the cloud for the various exercises.

Hadoop is a parallelized data processing framework. It lends itself very nicely to running in cloud environments like Amazon EC2 and IBM SCE, as the core concept is to split sophisticated queries across clusters of commodity hardware. On a basic level it’s an implementation of MapReduce in Java, but a great many tools in its eco system make it easy to formulate and execute queries on the fly.

The material will have some things in common with the free Hadoop Fundamentals course you can take on Big Data University today, though naturally adapted for the CASCON themes and with added hands-on instruction.

Next steps

• Register for the workshop
• Check out the self-paced course on Big Data University

There’s an intranet application that I need to use that does not work in Firefox 4, Firefox 5, Chrome, Opera, or Safari. It also runs painfully slowly in Microsoft Internet Explorer 8. Since it does support Firefox 3.6, I thought I’d try running two different versions of Firefox side by side.

1. Install Firefox if you don’t have it. At the time of writing, the latest stable version is Firefox 5.
2. Download Firefox 3.6.
3. Start the installation and choose the Custom installation type.
4. Install it to a non-standard location such as “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3.6\”
5. I recommend telling it to not create any shortcuts, as it will otherwise overwrite the Firefox 5 shortcuts.
6. Open up the folder where you keep your Firefox shortcuts. Make a copy of one of them.
7. Right-click -> Properties and add -ProfileManager to the target path (not the “Start in” field)
• "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -ProfileManager
8. Make sure Firefox is closed and launch that shortcut. It will open up the Firefox Profile Manager.
9. Create a new profile. Name it something like: Firefox36
10. Close the Profile Manager.
11. Configure the main shortcut as follows:
• Mozilla Firefox
• "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -P default
• "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\"
• Note: An earlier version of this post added the -no-remote parameter to the command line above. This prevented HTML links in other applications (e.g. Outlook, Lotus Notes) from using this browser. You only need to set it on one of the two shortcuts, and I’ve modified the instructions accordingly with the assumption that this shortcut is to your primary browser.
12. Configure the other shortcut as follows:
• Mozilla Firefox 3.6
• "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3.6\firefox.exe" -P Firefox36 -no-remote
• "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3.6\"
13. Voila!

Links

• Firefox command line arguments

Here’s an interesting example from the InfoSphere BigInsights/Hadoop class I’m attending right now. Note that Social, Mobile, Games, and Heritage are tabs that you can switch between.

Let’s back up a bit. What is LiveJournal?

LiveJournal, or Zhivoi Zhurnal as its Russian userbase calls it, is a social network masquerading as a blogging platform. It started in 1999, 3 years before Friendster, and provided:

• Fine-grained access control to individual posts
• Ability to group your friends into circles
• One-way friend relationships (so you could be a follower of someone without them friending you back)
• An equivalent to Facebook’s News Feed years before FB filed a patent on it

Google+ has all of these features. Not just that, but it exposes them much better than inertia-laden LiveJournal ever did, and it is amenable to long posts.

LJ is a smaller fish than Facebook, with only 32,000,000 friends of whom only 2,000,000 are active, but targeting this community could give Google a sufficient core of users to take on the Facebook behemoth.

Will LiveJournal users migrate? I’m not sure. LiveJournal satisfies several rather different demographics. 48% of its active user base is Russian, exemplified by President Dmitry Medvedev and various photoblogs. There’s a big celebrity news community called Oh No They Didn’t. There’s also a significant scifi and comics fandom userbase exemplified by Scans Daily that is already moving to a clone site called DreamWidth. Some of these groups may be more amenable to the lure of Google+ than others.

I can say that the circle of people I met back when I had a journal on Slashdot in the early 2000s migrated to G+ overnight, and LiveJournal fostered and fosters similar communities. They could very well follow and give Google the critical mass that it craves.

BigInsights is IBM’s distribution of Hadoop.

What’s Hadoop? It’s a great way to crunch through massive amounts of unstructured data like email archives, geographic stuff, economic measurements, and so on to find interesting patterns. It rests on the Map-Reduce algorithm, which is what Google uses when you search. Much Google’s success rests on Map-Reduce’s ability to scale out on commodity hardware.

(Notably, the whole Cloud Computing thing is the flip side of using massive arrays of commodity hardware. Since you have so much of it, you need a way to automate and abstract the management as much as possible. Since you’ve automated and abstracted away management, you might as well sell it as a service.)

Hadoop itself is an Apache Software Foundation project nurtured by Yahoo among others. It’s gaining an increasing number of commercial distributions including Cloudera, IBM, and now Hortonworks.

You can quickly try out BigInsights Basic on the cloud or download it to your own machine.

I really do recommend the macro that

Easily Deploy Database Workloads on Private Clouds

Date:                 Wednesday, June 29, 2011 (29.6.2011)
Time:                 12:30 AM – 2:00 PM Eastern Time (ET)
11:30 AM Central / 9:30 AM Pacific / 17:30hrs London / 18:30hrs Frankfurt, Paris / India 10 PM
Speakers:         Sal Vella, Leon Katsnelson, Rav Ahuja, Chris Gruber

As more and more businesses look for ways to reduce costs within IT, their research typically discovers cloud computing. However Public Clouds are not an option for many enterprise workloads and applications with strict security and privacy requirements. Organizations with such needs can benefit from building Private Clouds within their own data centers. In this webcast we will look at a fast path to deploying private clouds for database workloads.

We will specifically look at instant provisioning of DB2 systems and databases in a private cloud infrastructure using the IBM Workload Deployer (IWD), previously called the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance. We will also look at how IWD can be easily used for implementing complete web application patterns with web servers, application servers (WebSphere), and DB2 database servers with high availability options.

To learn more, please join experts from the IBM labs – Sal Vella, Leon Katsnelson, Rav Ahuja, and Chris Gruber.

Presentation charts will be available from ibm.com/db2/labchats just before the webcast starts.

Register

It surprised me by completely reversing the meaning of what I wrote:

That’s the complete opposite meaning!

This is the first time I’ve been irritated enough to correct a Google translation. It’s a common word, so I’ m not sure what could have led to the misapprehension on Google’s part.