[irq]: techie interrupted

In order to “remove the excuses” for business users not loading their data into the system, they just need to point the custom-built user interface at their files. (Disney’s platform is growing at 5TB a day, and there are still many other types of data it needs to house, Jacob said.) Because they’ve built wrappers around the technology, Jacob’s team doesn’t talk about Hadoop and MongoDB to internal users, only about analytics and queries. It built client frameworks in a bunch of programming languages so developers can interact with the platform without writing RESTful API calls.

In some cases, the team decided to hide the platform’s complexity from users; not to facilitate its use, but to keep loose-cannon developers from doing something crazy that could take down the whole cluster. It could show them all the controls and knobs in a NoSQL database, but “they tend to shoot each other,” Jacob said. “First they shoot themselves, then they shoot each other.”