In the past year, Sure Product Consulting has done a lot of work in the emerging “Big Data” sector. Our clients have included newborn startups building their business models on top of NoSQL technologies, as well as traditional business intelligence and database vendors.
In the process, we’ve had to come up to speed quickly on what “Big Data” is exactly, the underlying technologies, the differences, the specific challenges, and so on.
Because Big Data is such a rapidly evolving field – important new developments occur every week — some of the best information sources are blogs.
Here are the blogs that we found most useful in learning about this sector:
1. DBMS2 – Curt Monash’s blog is truly the most informative we’ve found. You could spend weeks digging through his archives, and in the process you’d learn a ton about the state of the art in database, NoSQL, and BI. He has a no-bullshit style and seems to have a “personality” (if you know what I mean). Able to speak to the macro business issues as well as the most granular of technical details, Monash is an independent analyst with a wide readership. He often posts about what specific vendors are doing: watch the comments on these posts for extremely informative corrections/clarifications/debate from the aforementioned vendors and their competitors. His writing style is heavy on bullets and sub-bullets, but very readable and informative.
2. MyNoSQL Blog – by Alex Popescu. This very active blog keeps up with the latest news and developments in NoSQL databases. There is frequent discussion about how one type of NoSQL database compares to another, and when and why NoSQL might be a better choice than a traditional relational architecture. It’s not the best written, but makes up for it with currency and completeness.
3. The High Scalability Blog. This blog is about building highly scalable websites in general, and not specifically about data management. Topics also include “The Cloud” (2011′s most abused technology term) and overviews of the architecture of some of the biggest websites out there. But Hadoop/MapReduce and other NoSQL technologies get about half the space on this blog.
4. GigaOm’s Cloud Blog – Dedicated primarily to “the Cloud”, about 25% of the time, this blog covers Big Data topics. These articles are always well written. But, darn it, some of the articles you really want to read are only available to paid subscribers of the GigaOm Pro service.
