John Piekos
John Piekos is vice president of engineering at VoltDB, where he heads up VoltDB’s engineering operations, including product development, QA, technical support, documentation, and field engineering. He has more than 25 years of experience leading teams and building software, delivering both enterprise and Internet-based solutions — and he uses that knowledge to ensure that VoltDB remains the fastest, coolest database on the planet.
John has held tech leadership positions at several companies, most recently at Progress Software where he led the OpenEdge database, ObjectStore database and Orbix product lines. Previously, John was vice president of web engineering at EasyAsk, and chief architect at Novera Software, where he led the effort to build the industry’s first Java application server. John holds an MS in computer science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a BS in computer science from the University of Lowell.
Improving on the Lambda Architecture for streaming analysis
Using fast, scalable relational databases to build event-oriented applications.
Modern organizations have started pushing their big data initiatives beyond historical analysis. Fast data creates big data, and applications are being developed that capture value, specifically real-time analytics, the moment fast data arrives. The need for real-time analysis of streaming data for real-time analytics, alerting, customer engagement or other on-the-spot decision-making, is converging on a layered software setup called the Lambda Architecture.
The Lambda Architecture, a collection of both big and fast data software components, is a software paradigm designed to capture value, specifically analytics, from not only historical data, but also from data that is streaming into the system.
In this article, I’ll explain the challenges that this architecture currently presents and explore some of the weaknesses. I’ll also discuss an alternative architecture using an in-memory database that can simplify and extend the capabilities of Lambda. Read more…