Cascalog is a powerful and easy-to-use data analysis tool for Hadoop, developed by Nathan Marz, focusing on large-scale systems and ETL workflows. It features a Clojure-based query language with Datalog-inspired syntax, allowing users to perform dynamic queries and custom operations efficiently. The document highlights its setup simplicity, a news feed generator demo, and provides project resources for further exploration.

1. Cascalog
Nathan Marz, BackType
Po wer fu l a n d ea sy-t o- us e data a n a lysi s to ol fo r H adoo p

2. About Me
Tech Lead at BackType
Have been working on many-terabyte scale
systems for two years
ETL workflows
Data warehouses

3. What is Hadoop?
Distributed Filesystem
MapReduce Framework
Scales to thousands of machines and petabytes of
data

4. What is Cascalog?
Clojure-based query language for Hadoop with
Datalog-inspired syntax
Queries compile to one or more MapReduce jobs
The tool I wish I had two years ago

5. Features
Inner and outer joins
Aggregators
Functions
Subqueries
Sorting
High performance

6. What sets Cascalog apart?
Super simple
Full power of Clojure always available
Easy to extend with custom operations
Dynamic queries
Arbitrary inputs and outputs

7. What sets Cascalog apart?
Super simple
Full power of Clojure always available
Easy to extend with custom operations
Dynamic queries
Arbitrary inputs and outputs

8. Experiment with Cascalog
Ships with test
dataset that can be
queried locally (the
“playground”)
5 minutes to setup
Hadoop, Clojure, and
Cascalog locally - see
README

9. News feed generator
Ranks events in
social network
for each person
based on
“importance”
and recency
38 lines of code

10. Demo time!

11. News Feed
“Follows” and “Action” data sources
Text files on HDFS
Follows Action

12. News Feed

13. News Feed
Custom Aggregator to produce a
news feed in JSON-like form

14. News Feed
Custom Function
to score each item
in the feed

15. News Feed
Data sources

16. News Feed
Subquery to compute
follower count for
each person

17. News Feed
Tie everything
together in a single
Cascalog query

18. Questions?
Project page:
http://www.github.com/nathanmarz/cascalog
Tutorial:
http://nathanmarz.com/blog/introducing-cascalog
Follow me on Twitter: @nathanmarz