Hortonworks

Recovering your HDP 2.6.1 Sandbox on VirtualBox after a restart

If you’ve worked with the Hortonworks Data Platform 2.x sandbox of later versions in VirtualBox and made it shutdown rather vigorously, you might have noticed that you won’t get past this startup screen when you try to start it up the next time:

I had this a couple of times and that’s why I decided to pause my sandbox every time and save it before shutting down my laptop. But yesterday Windows 10 decided to step in. After a day of studying it was high time for me to have dinner, during which I kept the laptop on. Little did I know that Windows 10 at that time decided to update and restart. And to do this, it needed to shutdown every application. Including VirtualBox. When I came back I found out to my horror that my carefully prepared HDP sandbox was shutdown in the roughest of ways. Thanks, Microsoft! (more…)

By Marcel-Jan Krijgsman, ago

Certifying as HDP Certified Administrator

Let’s talk about certification. The thing by which you try to show potential employers and customers that you actually know what you are doing at work. My only experience up to last Tuesday with IT product-related certifications was with Oracle’s Certified Professional program. I’ve been OCP for the database from 8i to 11g plus I’m 11g Database Performance Tuning Certified Expert. But all these exams were mainly multiple choice and to really test your knowledge the exams often contained some obscure stuff that you would rarely use. I’ll never forget the question about v$waitstat in one of these exams… well, I digress.

OCP wasn’t exactly embraced by all Oracle DBA’s either. A lot of experienced DBA’s saw it more as a way for inexperienced DBA’s to show they .. knew how to learn lots of facts about Oracle databases. Companies with lots of inexperienced DBA’s loved it, hoping that this would entice customers to invite their otherwise green “medior” DBA’s.

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By Marcel-Jan Krijgsman, ago

Quickly start of the Nifi crash course

As I said last in my last blogpost, I have followed the Apache NiFi crash course that Hortonworks provides. Now the tutorial describes several different scenarios and options and you have to read through that to find which you want. And you don’t have time for that. You’re probably doing this in your spare time and you have a whole Netflix backlog.

So in this guide we cut right to the chase. It took me about 10 hours to follow Tutorial 0, 1, 2 and 3. But perhaps this guide can make you do it in about 4 hours.

1. Preparing the VM

First download the Hortonworks Sandbox. There’s a VirtualBox (used in this example), VMWare and Docker image that come preinstalled with many products, but NiFi isn’t installed just yet (this guide is based on the HDP 2.6 sandbox).

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By Marcel-Jan Krijgsman, ago

How to learn Big Data

“How do you got in Big Data?”, is a question that people asked me a couple of times now. So let me give that answer in a blogpost as well.

I’ve used eight sources of Big Data related knowledge and skills:

  • Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
  • Books
  • Meetups and summits
  • Podcasts
  • Videos
  • Online documentation
  • Hands-on experience
  • Learning sites/”universities” of vendors

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By Marcel-Jan Krijgsman, ago