Biography

Robbie works for The Weather Channel, leading the team that builds data analysis services for weather.com and the TWC mobile apps. He has been involved in the Cassandra project since 2010 and has contributed in a variety of ways over the years; this includes work on drivers for Scala and C#, the Hadoop and Spark integrations, heading up the Atlanta Cassandra Users Group, and answering lots of Stack Overflow questions.

Cassandra + Spark: The New Analytics Toolbox

The state of analytics has changed dramatically over the last few years. Hadoop is now commonplace, and the ecosystem has evolved to include new tools such as Spark, Shark, and Drill, that live alongside the old MapReduce-based standards. It can be difficult to keep up with the pace of change, and newcomers are left with a dizzying variety of seemingly similar choices. This is compounded by the number of possible deployment permutations, which can cause all but the most determined to simply stick with the tried and true. In this talk I will introduce you to a powerhouse combination of Cassandra and Spark, which provides a high-speed platform for both real-time and batch analysis.