ReadWriteWeb

Pentaho Corporation today announced that it has made freely available under open source all the big data capabilities in its Kettle v4.3 release, and has moved the entire Pentaho Kettle project to the Apache License Version 2.0. This is the same open source license that Hadoop and others use. We have covered Pentaho before here.

FireHost is expanding and offering European services, Dell is letting its customers have Linux their way, and EnterpriseDB wants to "cloudify" PostgreSQL.

FireHost's European-Based Secure Cloud Hosting Services Go Live – FireHost has announced an expansion into Europe, with services through data centers in London and Amsterdam.

Craigslist loves Perl, Amazon wants to help customers use geo-blocking, and if you're looking for an overview of Hadoop solutions then we've got a good link for you.

Geo-Blocking Content With Amazon CloudFront – Geo-targeting has its good and bad side. I'll let you decide where geo-blocking content falls. If it's something your company needs to do, though, Amazon has a short post by Nihar Bihani of the CloudFront team on using geo-blocking for content with CloudFront.

Much has been said about Facebook's Timeline feature, but very little attention has been paid to the actual tech behind the feature. Timeline goes well beyond the scope of Facebook's previous profile pages and deals with years of Facebook activity. Starting this Fall, O'Reilly and Cloudera are going to be smooshing together their conferences, and Siddharth Anand has some thoughts on the state of NoSQL in 2012.

The State of NoSQL in 2012 – Anand has some thoughts on the limitations of today's NoSQL options. "Many of the NoSQL vendors view the "battle of NoSQL" to be akin to the RDBMS battle of the 80s, a winner-take-all battle. In the NoSQL world, it is by no means a winner-take-all battle. Distributed Systems are about compromises."

Last month, veteran IDC analyst Dan Vesset predicted that while Hadoop will become a standard component of the modern data center, by 2015 the market around Hadoop will have matured at such a rate that the major players we recognize today probably would no longer exist. MapR - a commercial Hadoop provider whose name was inspired by the MapReduce programming model for Hadoop - was one of the companies on Vesset's target list for acquisition, and perhaps a ceremonial asterisk for history once Wikipedia emerges from blackout.

So you might expect the predictions of MapR CEO John Schroeder for the year 2012 would not include obscurity for his own company. But Schroeder makes at least an arguable case: The difference, he says, between the database market in 2012 versus the one from 1992 has to do with the customer's preference to refrain from vendor lock-in, and that customer's newfound ability to ensure against it.

Today we've got links to presentations and slides from Hadoop World 2011, tutorials on scripting KVM with Python, a library for working with AWS services using Node.js and more.

Hadoop World 2011 Videos and Slides Available – Cloudera has published slides and videos from the Hadoop World 2011 presentations. If you couldn't be there in person, or were but missed some of the presos, it's worth checking out.

The OpenStack community is getting ready for a bug-squashing day, BitNami has Windows AMIs that qualify for Amazon's free usage tier and Christopher Miles has an interesting post on working with Hadoop, HBase and Clojure.

All Your HBase Are Belong to Clojure – Miles goes into great detail on setting up HBase, defining the Hadoop job, and a lot more.

Kathleen Ting has a preview of Apache Sqoop 2, it's getting easier to deploy Octopress on Heroku, and Todd Hoff over at the High Scalability Blog has a look at Peregrine, a possible challenger to Hadoop.

Highlights of Sqoop2 – Apache Sqoop is a project for efficiently transferring bulk data between Hadoop and external data stores. Ting looks at some of the challenges for the current iteration of Sqoop, and how Sqoop 2 is supposed to solve these problems.

LinkedIn has been making heavy use of Apache Hadoop and Pig with its People You May Know and skills features (among others), and has pulled together a lot of User Defined Functions (UDFs) for Pig in the process.

On January 10th, LinkedIn's Matthew Hayes announced the release of DataFu on the LinkedIn engineering blog. DataFu is available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. DataFu is a collection of UDFs that LinkedIn has developed for data mining and statistics.

It seems like just like summer, Bill Murray used to sing, and that's because it was. This year, for the first time, ReadWriteWeb expanded its coverage of the technologies that change our world through the Web, with new emphasis on cloud-based services to consumers and cloud technologies for businesses. Cloud services are more than just hosts for apps. They're resources that you can provision for your changing needs, and which you can scale up or down as necessary.

Certainly 2011 was dramatically different from 2010 for businesses for one critical reason: In a very short time, suddenly true scalability for every IT service appeared within their reach. A market that was almost non-existent by the end of last year, has grown past what many analysts would consider the point of adolescence, with the shakeout subsiding and brand dropouts declining. Someone should remind these cloud service folks there's a recession going on.