We've known about Apache Kafka for several years now - we first encountered it when we developed a prototype streaming Boolean search engine for media monitoring with our own library Luwak. Kafka is a distributed streaming platform with some simple but powerful concepts - everything it deals with is a stream ...Continue reading
JSON has been the lingua franca of data exchange for many years. It's human-readable, lightweight and widely supported. However, the JSON spec does not define what parsers should do when they encounter a duplicate key in an object, e.g.:
{
"foo": "spam",
"foo": "eggs",
...
}
Implementations are free to interpret this how they like. When different systems have different interpretations this can cause problems.
We recently encounter...Continue reading
We're very happy to announce our partnership with Confluent, which was founded by the creators of Apache Kafka, a stream data platform and the central component of their Confluent Platform. Flax has been aware of Kafka since its inception at LinkedIn, where it is used as the messaging backb...Continue reading
We've been working on a number of projects recently involving open source software often quoted as 'Big Data' solutions - here's a quick overview of them. The grandfather of them all of course is Apache Hadoop, now not so much a single project as an ecosystem including storage and processing for potentially huge amounts of data, spread across clusters of machines. Interestingly Hadoop was originally created by D...Continue reading
Last night I dropped in on the Unified Log Meetup at JustEat's offices (of course, they provided lots of pizza for us all!). I've written about this Meetup before - as a rule the events cover logging and analytics at massive scale, with search being only part of the picture. Joseph Francis from Continue reading
Last week Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, landed in London for one of their current series of one-day events. The £50 entrance fee has been put to good use, raising £16750 for AbilityNet who work on accessible IT - a very generous offer by Elastic. Shay Banon, creator of Elasticsearch, kicked off...Continue reading
I was lucky enough to attend the London ElasticSearch User Group's Meetup last night - around 130 people came to the Goldman Sachs offices in Fleet Street with many more on the waiting list. It signifies quite how much interest there is in ElasticSearch these days and the event didn't disappoint, with some fascinating talks. Hugo Pickford-Wardle from Continue reading
