Today, we'll discuss the ways in which ETL tools can connect, consolidate, and sync data between OLTP and OLAP systems. We'll begin by defining the uses of OLTP and OLAP systems and then explore how ETL tools can connect them.

In my last post, I gave a brief introduction on Blockchains, and how it's all the hype because of its ability to completely eliminate the middle man during transactions - all you need are the two interested parties and a few lines of code to help validate the trade. These seemingly simple lines of code can actually be deceptively complex. If they have the ability to seal the deal between the two parties, why not refer to them as Smart Contracts?

Microservices is all the hype these days, so in this post, I'll try to highlight its most important aspects. I've split these aspects into four groups based on the different benefits they provide. 

File-sharing is one of the most elementary ways to perform system integration. In the context of Web applications, we refer to the process where a user sends data/files from a local computer to a remote computer as upload.

The main goal of choosing an Authentication Protocol is to avoid the heavy lifting on development side and to make it easy on the API users with regards to consuming APIs. With OAuth2, the user authenticates as a virtual user with the same credentials they normally use to access the web app. Many developers will find that with OAuth2, their application security will be strengthened and their workload lightened.

Software systems have definitely changed throughout the years. Initially, large mainframes were used to process batches of jobs overnight for long hours to get the results that banks and big companies needed. Eventually, big systems were used to process different online jobs, which required large data centers with cold safe rooms to house their servers. Now, we have the ever-elusive cloud, which is a shared space where we can rent processing time and let our software run according to our needs.

Simply defining Hadoop is a difficult task. Since Hadoop doesn’t fit in other common software categories such as operational systems, databases, message queues, etc., defining it usually requires long sentences. However, long sentences would prevent this introduction from achieving its purpose, which is to explain Hadoop and its' MapReduce framework to those who know absolutely nothing about it. So, how do we explain something without describing what it is? By describing what it does and how it works.