Database Reference
In-Depth Information
The emphasis on security in BigInsights shows through here, because some-
one with an Application Administrator role can determine which users are to
be authorized to run specific apps. Given that there are data sources or services
where security credentials are required, the apps interface lets you leverage the
BigInsights credentials store, enabling you to securely pass authentication
information to the data source or service to which you're connecting.
Data Discovery and Visualization: BigSheets
Although Hadoop makes analyzing Big Data possible, you pretty much need
to be a programmer with a good understanding of the MapReduce paradigm
to explore the data. We've seen what happens when you try to explain paral-
lel programming concepts to nontechnical people, so clearly there's a big
barrier that keeps most business analysts from being able to make sense of
data that's stored in Hadoop. BigInsights has the answer: a browser-based
visualization tool called BigSheets. This tool enables line-of-business users to
harness the power of Hadoop using a familiar spreadsheet interface. Big-
Sheets requires no programming (it automatically generates Hadoop code
underneath the covers) or special administration. If you can use a spread-
sheet (pivot, slice, dice, and so on), you can use BigSheets to perform analysis
on vast amounts of data, in any structure.
Three easy steps are involved in using BigSheets to perform Big Data
analysis:
1.
Collect data
. You can collect data from multiple sources, using apps
that are deployed in BigInsights to crawl the Web, local files, or files
on your network. Multiple protocols and formats are supported,
including HTTP, HDFS, Amazon S3 Native File System (s3n), and
Amazon S3 Block File System (s3), and more. There's also a facility
to extend BigSheets with custom plug-ins for importing data. For
example, you could build a plug-in to harvest Twitter data and
include it in your BigSheets collections.
2.
Extract and analyze data.
After you have collected the data, you can
see a sample of it in the spreadsheet interface, such as that shown
in Figure 5-3. At this point, you can manipulate your data by using
the spreadsheet-type tools that are available in BigSheets. For
example, you can combine columns from different collections, run
formulas, or filter data. You can also deploy custom macros for
BigSheets. For example, you can deploy a text extractor that you
