IBM Biginsights for begineers and research projects.
What do you like best?
I liked as for many reasons but two most important are
1. it is very easy to install and play the image through the VMWare player.
2. The software framework has all the installed environment such as HBase, HIVE and it is very easy to upgrade too.
What do you dislike?
Actually, individual upgrade or if someone wants to install and configure the in-built environment is a bit hard. I remember trying to install HBase v 1.1. and remove the previous version that was already part of the software. It took time to debug. Upgradation of the individual frameworks can be made easy.
2. The VM image requires a lot of hard disks, minimum allocation of 30 GB, which is kind of difficult if the image is run on an internal hard drive. But this problem is solved while using an external hard drive.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Those who are beginners in High-performance computing frameworks. It gives a kickstart to play around the files and understand the application of the concepts better.
On the other hand, one does not have to think much about installing Linux environment to run the basic Hadoop code. It is co-integration of a lot of packages where one can learn HBase, HIVE, PIG, and Hadoop without thinking of installing one-by-one on Linux OS.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
I used this for my research project in the undergrad, at the office I used this to conduct Proof of Concepts(PoCs) such as HBase write operation, build environment and many non-functional testing. It is very easy to code as Eclipse IDE is well-integrated in the framework.
