Semi-regular field notes from the world of data: Alibaba ♥ Spark: Next time someone asks you if Apache Spark scales, point them to this recent post by Chinese e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba. What particularly caught my eye is the company’s heavy usage of GraphX, Spark’s library for graph analytics. [Full disclosure: I’m an advisor to Databricks,Continue reading “Bits from the Data Store”
Tag Archives: Julia
IPython: A unified environment for interactive data analysis
[A version of this post appears on the O’Reilly data blog and Forbes.] As I noted in a recent post on reproducing data projects, notebooks have become popular tools for maintaining, sharing, and replicating long data science workflows. Much of that is due to the popularity of IPython1. In development since 2001, IPython grew outContinue reading “IPython: A unified environment for interactive data analysis”
Data analysis tools target non-experts
[A version of this post appears on the O’Reilly Strata blog.] A new set of tools make it easier to do a variety of data analysis tasks. Some require no programming, while other tools make it easier to combine code, visuals, and text in the same workflow. They enable users who aren’t statisticians or dataContinue reading “Data analysis tools target non-experts”