Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by maxxxxx on Thursday November 30, 2017 @04:48PM (#15819877)

Yep. this is going on everywhere. How many solid but boring Java applications have been replaced by a microservice, cloud, NoSQL, NoieJS monster?

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by sogen on Friday December 01, 2017 @12:00AM (#15822049)

http://www.zdnet.com/article/disgruntled-developer-breaks-th...

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by sokoloff on Thursday November 30, 2017 @04:54PM (#15819926)

They're practicing RDD -> "Résumé Driven Development"

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by maxxxxx on Thursday November 30, 2017 @05:07PM (#15820033)

Agreed. The problem is that RDD works extremely well if you want to get ahead.

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by JustAnotherPat on Thursday November 30, 2017 @05:36PM (#15820271)

you laugh, but a guy who knows Hadoop is worth more than a guy who doesn't all else being equal

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by oldandtired on Thursday November 30, 2017 @11:21PM (#15821869)

One must disagree with this. It doesn't matter what the technology is, if one has the appropriate mindset and enough years under the belt, it will be picked up.

What matters in terms of better value is whether or not one can understand the problems space and find an appropriate solution for it. All sorts of solution space solutions can be used, some of which are better than others. The point is to try and keep it simple enough for the user, irrespective of how difficult it might be for the IT guy.

The knowledge of Hadoop in and of itself is not as valuable as one would suggest it is.

[Edit fix wording]

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by maxxxxx on Thursday November 30, 2017 @11:35PM (#15821932)

Unfortunately that's not how the job market works in most cases.

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by chii on Friday December 01, 2017 @12:32AM (#15822141)

That's only true if the management level can't see that they are screwing themselves over, either willingly or ignorantly.

Hiring a hadoop guy for what used to work in excel is a bad decision in most ceases...

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by sgt101 on Thursday November 30, 2017 @04:57PM (#15819947)

Well, if you are taking many hours to process said data on a single processor machine (say eight cores) then throwing it into an environment where you can crunch it with many cores (say 1440) then this does make some kind of sense. Also putting the data into a secured multi user environment with redundancy and also business continuity.

as opposed to fecking sharepoint

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by Aloha on Thursday November 30, 2017 @05:07PM (#15820034)

Sharepoint is where good information goes to die. It's a write only wiki - you put stuff in and you can never find it again.

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by muxator on Thursday November 30, 2017 @06:09PM (#15820503)

Mervellous. Maybe this is true for a lot of DMSes, as well. But marvellous. :)

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by gaius on Friday December 01, 2017 @03:54AM (#15822753)

Well, if you are taking many hours to process said data on a single processor machine (say eight cores) then throwing it into an environment where you can crunch it with many cores (say 1440) then this does make some kind of sense

Yes but https://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-th...

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by sgt101 on Friday December 01, 2017 @07:32AM (#15823429)

Sometimes, but it depends on what you are doing with a data set - even if it's 1.75Gb : from the link...

"Since the problem is basically just to look at the result lines of each file and aggregate the different results" which is why this works on this data for this problem. Many problems are not efficient to solve in this way, for example searches through large products and expansions, especially where the evaluation function is costly.

Some problems are data bound - you are handling 100'sTb of data, hadoop can be a good fit.

Some problems are CPU bound, and embarrassingly parallel - you require massive parallelism to get through the core seconds that you need to solve the problem. If you need 1 million core seconds and you have 1000 cores, and a way of getting the 1000 cores to do 1/1000th of the work... all is good.

Some problems are memory bound. You can build single space machines with many TB memory now, also you can cache with SSD's and optanes more than in the past, but Hadoop does offer a utility for these problems.

But in a corporate all problems are admin and discovery bound. If your dataset is what I need and I don't know about it, can't find it and anyway if I did then you won't give it to me and I can't unlock it legitimately; I am screwed. If it's a proper corporate asset then I've got a fighting chance.

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by jordanb on Thursday November 30, 2017 @04:51PM (#15819902)

Not really. They could be trying to build a company-wide data lake. Some files in the lake will be very small, others will be very large. Because it's in HDFS it won't matter if the very small ones suddenly become very large.

End users groan because people groan every time anything changes and they have to learn something new.

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by klodolph on Thursday November 30, 2017 @05:02PM (#15820000)

I mean, end users also groan because the user experience for spreadsheets is far better than writing map reduce jobs. One is a skill that a large percentage of BS graduates have, another is a skill that a small percentage of CS graduates have.

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by jordanb on Thursday November 30, 2017 @07:19PM (#15820917)

You don't need to write map reduce jobs to access data in Hadoop. In fact, you can do it from excel:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Connect-to-a-Hadoop...

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by ghostly_s on Thursday November 30, 2017 @04:55PM (#15819936)

If users were previously empowered to do a task themselves, and now need to request another team do that task on their behalf, that's a very valid reason to be groaning IMO.

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by wil421 on Thursday November 30, 2017 @05:05PM (#15820020)

You have to understand that enterprise class companies don’t want Access databases under people desks. It might be valid reason for the sales or ordering guy who loses control to complain. For the IT professionals at the company it allows them to create a scalable solution that can be used at an enterprise level.

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by maxxxxx on Thursday November 30, 2017 @05:10PM (#15820052)

And suddenly every addition that could be done in 5 minutes now takes months or gets rejected by the devs.

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by jordanb on Thursday November 30, 2017 @07:21PM (#15820935)

Hadoop isn't Oracle. If you need to write a file to the data lake, you write it. If you need to read something out you do that too. There's no schema, it's actually a file system with actual files in it, like your shared drive. Except that it's distributed, can handle arbitrarily large files and lets you perform queries on those files instead of downloading all 2TB to access a single row.

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