Introduction
The amount of data produced by humans has exploded to unheard-of levels, with nearly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created daily. With advances in the Internet of Things and mobile technology, data has become a central interest for most organizations. More importantly than simply collecting it, though, is the real need to properly analyze and interpret the data that is being gathered. Also, most businesses collect data from a variety of sources, and each data stream provides signals that ideally come together to form useful insights. However, getting the most out of your data depends on having the right tools to clean it, prepare it, merge it and analyze it properly.
Here are ten of the best analytics tools your company can take advantage of in 2019, so you can get the most value possible from the data you gather.
What is Big Data?
Big data is high-volume, high-velocity and/or high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing that enable enhanced insight, decision making, and process automation.
Furthermore, Big Data is nothing but any data which is very big to process and produce insights from it. Also, data being too large does not necessarily mean in terms of size only. There are 3 V’s (Volume, Velocity and Veracity) which mostly qualifies any data as Big Data. The volume deals with those terabytes and petabytes of data which is too large to process quickly. Velocity deals with data moving with high velocity. Continuous streaming data is an example of data with velocity and when data is streaming at a very fast rate may be like 10000 of messages in 1 microsecond. Veracity deals with both structured and unstructured data. Data that is unstructured or time-sensitive or simply very large cannot be processed by relational database engines. This type of data requires a different processing approach called big data, which uses massive parallelism on readily-available hardware.
Trending Big Data Tools in 2019
1. Apache Spark
Apache Spark is a fast and general-purpose cluster computing system. It provides high-level APIs in Java, Scala, Python and R, and an optimized engine that supports general execution graphs. It also supports a rich set of higher-level tools including Spark SQL for SQL and structured data processing, MLlib for machine learning, GraphX for graph processing, and Spark Streaming.
Spark is designed to cover a wide range of workloads such as batch applications, iterative algorithms, interactive queries and streaming. Apart from supporting all these workloads in a respective system, it reduces the management burden of maintaining separate tools.
Apache Spark has the following features.
- Speed − Spark helps to run an application in Hadoop cluster, up to 100 times faster in memory, and 10 times faster when running on disk. This is possible by reducing the number of reading/write operations to disk. It stores the intermediate processing data in memory.
- Supports Multiple languages − Spark provides built-in APIs in Java, Scala, or Python. Therefore, you can write applications in different languages. Spark comes up with 80 high-level operators for interactive querying.
- Advanced Analytics − Spark not only supports ‘Map’ and ‘reduce’. It also supports SQL queries, Streaming data, Machine learning (ML), and Graph Algorithms.
2. Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka is a community distributed event streaming platform capable of handling trillions of events a day. Initially conceived as a messaging queue, Kafka is based on an abstraction of a distributed commit log. Since being created and open sourced by LinkedIn in 2011, Kafka has quickly evolved from messaging queue to a full-fledged event streaming platform.
Following are a few benefits of Kafka −
- Reliability − Kafka is distributed, partitioned, replicated and fault tolerance
- Scalability − Kafka messaging system scales easily without downtime
- Durability − Kafka uses Distributed commit log which means messages persists on disk as fast as possible, hence it is durable
- Performance − Kafka has high throughput for both publishing and subscribing messages. It maintains stable performance even many TB of messages are stored.
Kafka is very fast and guarantees zero downtime and zero data loss.
3. Flink
Apache Flink is a framework and distributed processing engine for stateful computations over unbounded and bounded data streams. Flink has been designed to run in all common cluster environments, perform computations at in-memory speed and at any scale.
It provides a high-throughput, low-latency streaming engine as well as support for event-time processing and state management. Flink applications are fault-tolerant in the event of machine failure and support exactly-once semantics. Programs can be written in Java, Scala, Python and SQL and are automatically compiled and optimized into dataflow programs that are executed in a cluster or cloud environment. Flink does not provide its own data storage system, but provides data source and sink connectors to systems such as Amazon Kinesis, Apache Kafka, Alluxio, HDFS, Apache Cassandra, and ElasticSearch.
4. Hadoop
The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage. Rather than rely on hardware to deliver high-availability, the library itself is designed to detect and handle failures at the application layer, so delivering a highly-available service on top of a cluster of computers, each of which may be prone to failures.
Following are the few advantages of using Hadoop:
- Hadoop framework allows the user to quickly write and test distributed systems. It is efficient, and it automatic distributes the data and work across the machines and in turn, utilizes the underlying parallelism of the CPU cores
- Hadoop does not rely on hardware to provide fault-tolerance and high availability
- You can add or remove the cluster dynamically and Hadoop continues to operate without interruption
- Another big advantage of Hadoop is that apart from being open source, it is compatible with all the platforms
5. Cassandra
The Apache Cassandra database is the right choice when you need scalability and high availability without compromising performance. Linear scalability and proven fault-tolerance on commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure make it the perfect platform for mission-critical data. Cassandra’s support for replicating across multiple datacenters is best-in-class, providing lower latency for your users and the peace of mind of knowing that you can survive regional outages.
Cassandra has become so popular because of its outstanding technical features. Given below are some of the features of Cassandra:
- Elastic Scalability — Cassandra is highly scalable; it allows to add more hardware to accommodate more customers and more data as per requirement
- Always on Architecture — Cassandra has no single point of failure and it is continuously available for business-critical applications that cannot afford a failure
- Fast linear-scale Performance — Cassandra is linearly scalable, i.e., it increases your throughput as you increase the number of nodes in the cluster. Therefore it maintains a quick response time
- Flexible Data Storage — Cassandra accommodates all possible data formats including: structured, semi-structured, and unstructured. It can dynamically accommodate changes to your data structures according to your need
- Easy Data Distribution — Cassandra provides the flexibility to distribute data where you need by replicating data across multiple data centers
- Transaction Support — Cassandra supports properties like Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID)
- Fast Writes — Cassandra was designed to run on cheap commodity hardware. It performs blazingly fast writes and can store hundreds of terabytes of data, without sacrificing the read efficiency
6. Apache Storm
Apache Storm is a free and open source distributed real-time computation system. Storm makes it easy to reliably process unbounded streams of data, doing for real-time processing what Hadoop did for batch processing. The storm is simple, can be used with any programming language, and is a lot of fun to use!
It has many use cases: real-time analytics, online machine learning, continuous computation, distributed RPC, ETL, and more. The storm is fast: a benchmark clocked it at over a million tuples processed per second per node. It is scalable, fault-tolerant guarantees your data will be processed, and is easy to set up and operate.
7. RapidMiner
RapidMiner is a data science software platform by the company of the same name that provides an integrated environment for data preparation, machine learning, deep learning, text mining, and predictive analytics.
8. Graph Databases (Neo4J and GraphX)
Graph databases are NoSQL databases which use the graph data model comprised of vertices, which is an entity such as a person, place, object or relevant piece of data and edges, which represent the relationship between two nodes.
They are particularly helpful because they highlight the links and relationships between relevant data similarly to how we do so ourselves.
Even though graph databases are awesome, they’re not enough on their own.
Advanced second-generation NoSQL products like OrientDB, Neo4j are the future. The modern multi-model database provides more functionality and flexibility while being powerful enough to replace traditional DBMSs.
9. Elastic Search
Elasticsearch is a search engine based on the Lucene library. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents.
Following are advantages of using elastic search:
- Elasticsearch is over Java, which makes it compatible on almost every platform.
- It is real time, in other words, after one second the added document is searchable in this engine.
- Also, it is distributed, which makes it easy to scale and integrate into any big organization.
- Creating full backups are easy by using the concept of the gateway, which is present in Elasticsearch.
- Handling multi-tenancy is very easy in Elasticsearch
- Elasticsearch uses JSON objects as responses, which makes it possible to invoke the Elasticsearch server with a large number of different programming languages.
- Elasticsearch supports almost every document type except those that do not support text rendering.
10. Tableau
Exploring and analyzing big data translates information into insight. However, the massive scale, growth and variety of data are simply too much for traditional databases to handle. For this reason, businesses are turning towards technologies such as Hadoop, Spark and NoSQL databases to meet their rapidly evolving data needs. Tableau works closely with the leaders in this space to support any platform that our customers choose. Tableau lets you find that value in your company’s data and existing investments in those technologies so that your company gets the most out of its data. From manufacturing to marketing, finance to aviation– Tableau helps businesses see and understand Big Data.
Summary
Understanding your company’s data is a vital concern. Deploying any of the tools listed above can position your business for long-term success by focusing on areas of achievement and improvement.
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