The first ever Cascading User Group will be this Thursday, September 24th, at RapLeaf. There will be discussions on the future of Cascading, the work done by the FlightCaster folk integrating Cascading with Clojure, and various tips and techniques. Hope to see you there.

Just wanted to point out few recent blog posts and upcoming events. First, if you are in the Atlanta area, check out July 21, 2009 – Cloud Computing with Hadoop, Map/Reduce and Cascading. Also, A new Cascading pipe – MultiGroupBy outlines a way to defer the joining of multiple streams during co-grouping to a subsequent operation (a Buffer). This is definitely something we would like to adopt in some fashion for Cascading 1.

Cascading WIP 1.1 is now available as source on GitHub and as a regression tested distribution at Concurrent, Inc.. Please consider this WIP (and any other Work In Progress branch) as unstable and unsuitable for production use. That said, the more users who test it will make it stable that much more quickly. Also note that the distribution downloads from Concurrent, Inc. are fully regression tested, so should be a drop in replacement for Cascading 1.

For those who missed the announcement, Hadoop: The Definitive Guide was made available early. Grab a copy and checkout the Case Study in the back on Cascading written by the Cascading project lead developer.

Don’t forget to sign up for ScaleCamp, the night before the Hadoop Summit 2009. Should be a nice collection of Cascading users milling about.

Chris will be presenting on Hadoop and Cascading twice this month (May) and twice next month (June). See below for a comprehensive list. Cloud Computing Paradigms: MapReduce, Hadoop, Cascading Tuesday, May 19, 2009 7:00 PM KeyPoint Credit Union 2805 Bowers Ave., Santa Clara, CA 95051 SAM SIG: Hadoop architecture, MapReduce patterns, and best practices w/Cascading 6:30 PM – 9:00 PM May 27, 2009 Cubberley Community Center 4000 Middlefield Rd.

Today we are excited to announce official support for Amazon Elastic MapReduce. With the Cascading 1.0 (Hadoop 0.18.3+) build (downloads), users can write and push their application into a dynamically provisioned Elastic MapReduce cluster via the AWS Console or the Ruby Command Line Client. We also created the Cascading.Multitool, an application that allows users to create and run Hadoop data processing jobs using simple program argument parameters, very much like unix pipes and filters.

With the push of the Cascading 1.0.6 maintenance release today, we also added official support for both Hadoop 0.19.0+ and Hadoop 0.18.3+ releases. That is, you can run any maintenance version of Hadoop 0.19, or any maintenance version of Hadoop 0.18.3 and above without any code changes to your Cascading application. Both libraries are API compatible and can be used interchangeably. Do note that if your application sets any properties specific to a given Hadoop version, they may not be recognized, but this is generally unlikely.

Grégoire Marabout just pushed up his Cascading.JRuby DSL to GitHub. Great job Greg! You can also find this and other extensions on our modules page.

Just pushed up experimental support for reading and writing from JDBC sources on the Cascading Modules page. Feel free to clone, test, patch, and notify us of any fixes/features on your branch.

Two interesting bits of news here. First, we released support for Apache HBase as a third-party module. Second, we have a new page listing user contributed extensions to Cascading. Both can be found on the Cascading Modules page.

Version 1.0.0 of Cascading is now available for download. For details on new features and bug fixes, see the CHANGES.txt file. This version of Cascading only supports Hadoop 0.19.x.

For those interested, here are the slides on Cascading Chris presented at the December NYC Hadoop User Group at ContextWeb.

Version 0.10.0 of Cascading is now available for download. For details on new features and bug fixes, see the CHANGES.txt file. This is a major release and considered the first Release Candidate for version 1.0.

Of interest to some, Chris has posted a short discussion on the Cascading MapReduce job planner. Also mentions the results of an informal feature comparison with Pig. You can read about it in Cascading and Pig Planners.

Concurrent, Inc. now officially offers Developer Support and Commercial Licensing for Cascading. You can read more about it on the Support page on the company site. Even though community support for Cascading will always exist, we ask users to consider purchasing support contracts to help fund the continued development of Cascading. That said, there isn’t any risk of Cascading stalling or stagnating, but funding through Support and Licensing helps keep the development velocity at a steady clip.

Chris will be presentation on Cascading at the NYC Hadoop User Group meeting on December 17. Hope to see you there.

Version 0.9.0 of Cascading is now available for download. For details on new features and bug fixes, see the CHANGES.txt file. This is a major release and provides support for Hadoop 0.19.x.