Aster Data is aiming to implant the term “Massively Powerful Processing (MPP)” firmly upon the collective technology industry consciousness with its Data Developer Express visual development environment.
This point-and-click tool was first introduced earlier this year and is also listed as a free download on the Eclipse Marketplace website. The Aster Data Developer Express IDE claims to ease the development and deployment of MapReduce-enabled analytical MPP applications.
MapReduce is a programming model patented by Google in 2004 that supports distributed computing on clusters or large sets of data held in data centers. Google describes MapReduce as, an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key."
According to Tasso Argyros, founder and CTO of Aster Data, "Our IDE has been proven to make it easy for developers and systems analysts to build, test and ... deploy rich analytic applications that leverage large volumes of data. Now, any developer or analyst that is familiar with the Java programming language can complete a rich analytic application in under an hour using the Aster Data Developer Express environment in Eclipse. Aster Data Developer Express delivers both rapid development and local testing of advanced analytic applications for any project, regardless of size."
Aster Data asserts that many of the MapReduce coding tasks, including programming concepts like parallelization and distributed data analysis, are addressed by the IDE without the developer or analyst needing to have expertise in these areas.
This simplification arguably makes it easier for developers to be quickly operational with this technology as it eliminates the need for them to have any deep knowledge of the MapReduce parallel processing framework.
