Aster Unleashed - Installing the Analytic Libraries

With your own Aster cluster installed and running (Getting Started with Aster Express), and a few Aster nPath examples under your belt (On the Road to nPath), it's time to unleash the full analytic power of Aster and install the remaining SQL-MR libraries.  These Aster Analytic modules are a powerful suite of reusable SQL-MapReduce® functions that deliver advanced analytics on Big Data with immediate business impact by leveraging the power of MapReduce programming through standard SQL.

This will be a quick and straightforward administrative process.  These libraries can only be installed on a running Aster cluster, which is why we've saved this step for now.  First logon to the Queen node, either with a remote ssh session, or directly on to the Queen node and open a terminal window.

At the terminal window command prompt, change to the 'demo' directory and unzip the Analytics_Foundation.zip file.  In this example, I'm creating a new target directory named 'sqlmr'.  This is only needed temporarily and can be deleted once installed to our Aster cluster.

cd demo

unzip Analytics_Foundation.zip -d sqlmr

A quick look at the files in this 'sqlmr' directory will give you a preview of the SQL-MR modules that we'll be loading.

Now we're ready to install these modules using the Aster ACT tool.  First change directory to where we unzipped the files, then run 'act':
  

cd sqlmr

act

ACT also has a 'cd' function, but I find it easier to do this prior to launching ACT.  Now start ACT, remember the default user/password is beehive/beehive, and then issue the install command, \i, and use the install.sql script in our library directory:

\i install.sql

This may take a few minutes, depending on your PC resources.  Once is completes, you can now check on the install modules using the ACT \dF command:

\dF

That's it.  You now have a loaded Aster Analytics tool ready to start crunching your Big Data!  Stay tuned for more articles that will demonstrate how to use these SQL-MR libraries.

Have fun!