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Posts tagged ‘Hadoop’

31
Aug

Sabbatical 2018 Week 3: What the Hadoop?

Coursera courseSo I finished my first Coursera course: Introduction to Big Data. It was the first and shortest of the 6 Big Data specialization courses. It was only a 3 week course. I added my course completion certificate to my LinkedIn profile, which needs to be updated. (hint hint)

I really like the reporting system in Coursera. I posted a screenshot that shows progress. It really helps the student know exactly where they are in the course and what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. If there is something to be done, it will be listed first with a Start button to quickly get to that part of the course, as you can see in the image. Makes me wish I had something like this for my students in my courses in Canvas.

The last part of this course had some programming. We got a short introduction to Hadoop and how to run the Wordcount program. Surprisingly this time I found playing in the Cloudera VirtualBox fun. Amazing how that is when you don’t run into errors and the programs work as expected. Or more accurately when there aren’t any user errors. I actually felt like I knew what I was doing. Maybe a little over confident, but eh, who cares.

I can’t imagine that I would remember the code to run the program: hadoop jar /usr/jars/hadoop-examples.jar wordcount in the future, but I do have good notes for future reference. And I’m still a little fuzzy about MapReduce, as initially I couldn’t see a good use for it in my work. Our last discussion in this class stumped me a bit: What are some examples in your work or daily life where applying the map reduce algorithm can speed up the process of the situation? Dang, that’s a good question. Ha! I guess I’m still trying to figure that one out beyond the basic sorting students by demographic data or past grades.

I’m also finishing week 4 of the second course: Big Data Modeling and Management Systems this week. Who knew there was so much to learn about data modeling. Data models deal with many different types of data formats. Streaming data is becoming ubiquitous, and working with streaming data requires a different approach from working with static data. So we are learning how to gain practical hands-on experience working with different forms of streaming data this week in this course.