Category: Technical How-to

Amazon Redshift is a cloud data warehousing service that provides high-performance analytical processing based on a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture. Building and maintaining data pipelines is a common challenge for all enterprises. Managing the SQL files, integrating cross-team work, incorporating all software engineering principles, and importing external utilities can be a time-consuming task that […]

In today’s data-driven world, organizations face unprecedented challenges in managing and extracting valuable insights from their ever-expanding data ecosystems. As the number of data assets and users grow, the traditional approaches to data management and governance are no longer sufficient. Customers are now building more advanced architectures to decentralize permissions management to allow for individual […]

In this era of big data, organizations worldwide are constantly searching for innovative ways to extract value and insights from their vast datasets. Apache Spark offers the scalability and speed needed to process large amounts of data efficiently. Amazon EMR is the industry-leading cloud big data solution for petabyte-scale data processing, interactive analytics, and machine […]

Managing data within an organization is complex. Handling data from outside the organization adds even more complexity. As the organization receives data from multiple external vendors, it often arrives in different formats, typically Excel or CSV files, with each vendor using their own unique data layout and structure. In this blog post, we’ll explore a […]

Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed cloud data warehouse that makes it straightforward and cost-effective to analyze all your data at petabyte scale, using standard SQL and your existing business intelligence (BI) tools. Today, tens of thousands of customers run business-critical workloads on Amazon Redshift. Amazon Redshift Serverless makes it effortless to run and […]

This post is co-written with Preshen Goobiah and Johan Olivier from Capitec. Apache Spark is a widely-used open source distributed processing system renowned for handling large-scale data workloads. It finds frequent application among Spark developers working with Amazon EMR, Amazon SageMaker, AWS Glue and custom Spark applications. Amazon Redshift offers seamless integration with Apache Spark, […]

Building a data platform involves various approaches, each with its unique blend of complexities and solutions. A modern data platform entails maintaining data across multiple layers, targeting diverse platform capabilities like high performance, ease of development, cost-effectiveness, and DataOps features such as CI/CD, lineage, and unit testing. In this post, we delve into a case […]

In this post, we show how you can authenticate into SageMaker Studio using an existing Active Directory (AD), with authorized access to both Amazon S3 and Hive cataloged data using AD entitlements via Apache Ranger integration and AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On). With this solution, you can manage access to multiple SageMaker environments and SageMaker Studio notebooks using a single set of credentials. Subsequently, Apache Spark jobs created from SageMaker Studio notebooks will access only the data and resources permitted by Apache Ranger policies attached to the AD credentials, inclusive of table and column-level access.

Amazon EMR Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) that makes it straightforward for data scientists and data engineers to develop, visualize, and debug data engineering and data science applications written in R, Python, Scala, and PySpark. EMR Studio provides fully managed Jupyter notebooks and tools such as Spark UI and YARN Timeline Server via […]

Software upgrades bring new features and better performance, and keep you current with the software provider. However, upgrades for software services can be difficult to complete successfully, especially when you can’t tolerate downtime and when the new version’s APIs introduce breaking changes and deprecation that you must remediate. This post shows you how to upgrade […]