Matsuo Basho, haiku master and NoSQL namesake
If you’re an amateur poet and love big data, high-performance system vendor AMAX has a deal for you. The company is conducting a contest (entry details here) to find the best haiku on big data, Hadoop or, if you’re a serious devotee, AMAX itself. Is it gimmicky? Of course, but there’s a colorable analogy in there, too.
As the press release explains:
Haiku is a well-known and well-loved medium for illuminating entire landscapes and concepts using efficient, powerful strokes carrying deep meaning on various levels. This poetic meaning is not unlike the sharp, incisive, refined and often dynamic intelligence that can be mined from extremely if not infinitely large datasets, and we believe Haiku in itself serves as a kindred analogy for the eloquence and infinite potential of Hadoop.
I’m not going to enter the contest, but I thought I’d share a couple of my own original poems on big data here:
Thirty petabytes
Facebook knows you best, save God?
Oracle? Hadoop.
See what I did there, invoking the two meanings of oracle? I’d be tough to beat. Here’s another, more skeptical work for the bubble-watchers out there:
Big data means cash
Ask Palantir, Cloudera
VC Spanish fly
But haiku can be a little high-falutin’, so I’ll close with something a little more accessible:
There once was a tech called Hadoop
Its purpose threw some for a loop
For one, they were told
If you know Java cold
You can find outliers in a group
And now, it’s back to my day job. But if you want to show off your skills, too, feel free to share poems in the comments. If you want to win an iPad, though, you’ll have to go through AMAX.
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