by Ian J. Ghent | May 2, 2024 | Apache Spark, Apache Spark Cafe, Python
I recently attended a fantastic conference on Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery put on by DRI Canada. The keynote speaker, Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon was phenomenal. He founded the Cascade Institute, which studies crisis and the factors leading up to them. One key...
by Ian J. Ghent | Mar 2, 2023 | Apache Spark, Apache Spark Cafe, Python, SAS
Back in 2015, when my colleagues and I first started reading about and experimenting with Apache Spark and PySpark, we knew there was something special brewing in open analytics. Being in the data and analytics world since 1997, I’ve seen lots of trends come and go....
by Ian J. Ghent | Sep 28, 2022 | Apache Spark, Apache Spark Cafe, Python
I’m often called upon to provide guidance on why adopting modern analytics is so important. In 2022, all the best features and functionality are in the open source world, especially the market leading Databricks and the PySpark language. Those capabilities are...
by Luigi (Lou) Di Serio | Aug 16, 2022 | Apache Spark, Apache Spark Cafe, Python, SAS
Mental Illness and Obsolete Skills October 2019 was the beginning of a very difficult and dark period for me. In truth, the decline began like a slow-motion train wreck during Christmas of 2018, but the main crisis point and collapse was triggered in October 2019. In...
by Ian J. Ghent | Jul 25, 2022 | Apache Spark Cafe, Cloud Computing, Python, SAS
It seems like everything these days is only for rent. The way we consume movies, music, books, computing, even the features in our cars, have all moved to be subscription model services, not products you buy and own. Pay once, own forever has increasingly become pay...
by Ian J. Ghent | Mar 18, 2022 | Apache Spark, Apache Spark Cafe, Cloud Computing, Python, SAS
What an absurd title! A strange twist on the “working hard or hardly working” cliché, but read on and I promise it will all make sense. Here’s a tale of a court jester and his great invention. Long ago in a vast and complex kingdom, there lived a great king. The...
