Every business, it seems, needs a data scientist, but not everyone knows what to look for. The four qualities of a good data scientist described here will help you first write a job description and then evaluate candidates for your data scientist vacancy.
Handmade marketplace Etsy has grown to 800,000 sellers and 40+ million monthly visitors. All that activity generates enormous quantities of data, which Etsy uses to drive site improvements.
"Big data" is the buzzword of the day, and learning to manage it and extract value from it is top of mind for executives across industries. A contributing factor to the surge in big data is a shift in prevailing corporate data management philosophies.
For some time Microsoft didn't offer a solution for processing big data in cloud environments. SQL Server is good for storage, but its ability to analyze terabytes of data is limited. Hadoop, which was designed for this purpose, is written in Java and was not available to .Net developers. So, Microsoft launched the Hadoop on Windows Azure service to make it possible to distribute the load and speed up big data computations.
Elasticity — the ability to ramp up or down computing resources depending on need — is one of the key benefits of cloud computing. Not being shackled to their own, in-house hardware means organisations can dial up the amount of resources they need to crunch big data sets, run their Web presence during spikes and troughs in demand and process periodic jobs without needing the internal resources necessary to cope with only peak demand.
Doug Cutting, creator of Hadoop and founder of the Apache Hadoop Project, says big data is not hype and it's not a bubble. He lays out his vision of how Hadoop will become the Holy Grail of big data systems
We all know what buzz is: It's noise. At InfoWorld, one of its self-appointed tasks is to extract the signal from that noise, to separate the stuff valuable to IT professionals from that which is popularly considered a big deal.