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Talend Sandbox Aims To Quicken Enterprise Adoption of Big Data

The Talend Big Data Sandbox promises "zero to Big Data without coding in under 10 minutes."

• By David Ramel
• 07/18/2014

Data integration company Talend wants to simplify the enterprise adoption of Big Data technology by removing the normal barriers in setting up such systems with an instant-on sandbox.

Noting that Big Data projects typically start out with developing a sandbox or proof-of-concept project, Talend said such undertakings are fraught with problems that can wreck or delay rollout plans.

"A completely configured virtual Big Data integration environment, the Big Data Sandbox provides a one-stop-shop for Big Data integration, data quality and Hadoop, saving developers weeks of installation and configuration time, as well as time spent building and integrating their first Big Data prototype," the company said in a statement. The company promises "zero to Big Data without coding in under 10 minutes."

The ready-to-run virtual environment combines the Talend Platform for Big Data with an Apache Hadoop distribution from Cloudera Inc., Hortonworks Inc. or Map4 Technologies Inc., the data integration company said.

To help developers get started quickly, Talend said it's including a Big Data Insights Cookbook with four ready-to-go scenarios: clickstream analysis; social media sentiment analysis; log stream analysis of Apache weblogs; and extract, transform and load (ETL) offloading with Hadoop. The cookbook also comes with video tutorials.

"Big Data developers are scarce and can be very costly," said Talend exec Fabrice Bonan. "Talend enables current data integration developers to quickly connect, transform and manage diverse structured and unstructured data sources without any MapReduce programming, using graphical Eclipse-based tools to generate optimized code."

The Eclipse-based tools can generate Java, MapReduce, Pig or HiveQL code. Developers can build complex transformations and code with multiple languages, such as Pig Latin, Sqoop, MapReduce/YARN, HiveQL and Java.

The sandbox comes with built-in connectivity to more than 800 pre-built data source including Big Data systems, such as Hive, HBase and NoSQL databases. Developers also get access to online video tutorials and the open Talend online community, the company said.

Interested developers can download a 30-day trial of the sandbox.

Because the Talend Platform for Big Data is included with the sandbox, users must be running Oracle VirtualBox 4.2 or higher; VMware Fusion 5.0 or higher (on Macs); or VMware Player (for Windows), along with at least 6 GB of disk space and 8 GB of RAM.