Note that even if you’re not a hard-core Bixo user, fringe benefits from participating include learning a lot about the very useful underlying technologies (Cascading, Hadoop, HttpClient) as well as getting an excuse to visit beautiful Nevada City.

Hope to see you there.

This new conference is on the 'business of data' and is the sister conference to Velocity.

Hope to see lots of proposals coming in from Hadoop, Cascading, Bixo, and Cascalog users and developers.

This release features many bug fixes.

For a detailed list of changes see: CHANGES.txt

This release will run against Hadoop 0.18.3, 0.19.x, and 0.20.x. Including Amazon Elastic MapReduce.

Note the tests will not compile or run against Hadoop 0.18.3 due to package changes since that version.

This release features many performance and usability enhancements while remaining backwards compatible with 1.0.

Specifically:

• Performance optimizations with all join types
• Numerous job planner optimizations
• Dynamic optimizations when running in Amazon Elastic MapReduce and S3
• API usability improvements around large number of field names
• Support for TSV, CSV, and custom delimited text files
• Support for manipulating and serializing non-Comparable custom Java types
• Debug levels supported by the job planner

For a detailed list of changes see: CHANGES.txt

Along with this release are a number of extensions created by the Cascading user community.

Among these extension are:

• Bixo - a data mining toolkit
• DBMigrate - a tool for migrating data to/from RDBMSs into Hadoop
• Apache HBase, Amazon SimpleDB, and JDBC integration
• JRuby and Clojure based scripting languages for Cascading
• Cascalog - a robust interactive extensible query language

This release will run against Hadoop 0.18.3, 0.19.x, and 0.20.x. Including Amazon Elastic MapReduce.

Note the tests will not compile or run against Hadoop 0.18.3 due to package changes since that version.

"Billy Newport is a Distinguished Engineer working on WebSphere eXtreme Scale (ObjectGrid) and on WebSphere high availability."

Cascalog is an interactive query language for Hadoop with a focus on simplicity, expressiveness, and flexibility intended to be used by Analysts and Developers alike.

Cascalog eschews the SQL syntax for a simpler and more expressive syntax based on Datalog.

With this added expressiveness, Cascalog can query existing data stores "out of the box" with no required data "importing" or "under the hood" configuration necessary.

Because Cascalog sits on top of Clojure, a powerful JVM based language and interactive shell, adding new operations to a query is as simple as defining a new function.

Cascalog also relies on Cascading, a robust data processing API and query planner.

Here is the canonical "word count" query in Cascalog:

(?<- (stdout) [?word ?count] (sentence ?s) (split ?s :> ?word) (c/ count ?count))

You can check out an introductory blog post here: http://nathanmarz.com/blog/introducing-cascalog/

The project is hosted here: http://github.com/nathanmarz/cascalog

Karmasphere Studio is an IDE and Debugger for Hadoop MapReduce application developers that also includes integration with the Amazon Web Services platform.

And with Cascading support directly in the Debugger and IDE, developers can even more quickly develop and debug complex Hadoop jobs.

Also worthy of note, Karmasphere recently received $5M Series A funding.

Note we are no longer serving downloads from Google Code but from links off the download page.

In short, DBMigrate is a more flexible and reliable alternative to Sqoop for moving data to/from a relational data store.

Cascading.JDBC has been around for quite a while, but DBMigrate overcomes some of the limitations when dealing with MySQL servers (AsterData did not have the same limitations) and OFFSET/LIMIT queries.

Riffle is a lightweight Java library for executing collections of dependent processes as a single process. It is Apache licensed so it can be included in non-GPL compatible projects.

The next major version of Cascading (1.2) will support the Riffle annotations so that projects like Mahout and Pig can participate in a Cascading Cascade execution.

Riffle can be found on its GitHub project page.

You can read about all the changes in the CHANGES.txt file.

Note we are no longer serving downloads from Google Code but from links off the download page.

This is in part a result of their Public Terabyte Dataset Project in AWS.

Please feel free to review and email in any comments or suggestions to the mailing list.

To download the most recent build of Cascading 1.1, please visit the download page at Concurrent. There are plans to have a 1.1 final release candidate available on the community site this week.