Vertica Blog
Mark Whalley

Mark

Manager, Vertica Education

From the early 1980s, Mark worked with Michael Stonebraker's Ingres RDBMS and then a number of column-store big data analytics technologies.
In 2016, he joined HPE Big Data Platform as a Systems Engineer specialising in Stonebraker’s Vertica.
In September 2017 he followed Vertica as it merged into Micro Focus – one of the world’s largest pure-play software companies.
He is passionate about technology and frequently delivers talks at the London, Cambridge and Munich Big Data & Machine Learning Meetups (of which he is the founder with its 4K+ members), the British Computer Society – Advanced Programming Specialist Group, Vertica Forums, the Institute for Analytics and Data Science at the University of Essex et al.
He is a technical blogger and author.

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Vertica Team at Data Innovation Summit booth

Data Innovation Summit 2019

Mark Whalley, Manager, Vertica Education
April 9, 2019

Having attended the Big Data Analytics – Europe event in Rotterdam on the 12th March, on 14th/15th, Captain Mark Whalley and fellow Captains from Vertica Airways paid a flying visit to the Data Innovation Summit in Stockholm. Whilst there, they crewed the Vertica booth answering questions from passengers and visitors and assuring them that their...
Commercial passenger plane with Vertica painted on the tail

Blog Post Series: Using Vertica to Track Commercial Aircraft in near Real-Time — Part 7

Mark Whalley, Manager, Vertica Education
April 4, 2019

Preparing Vertica to consume messages from Kafka How time has flown (no pun intended!).  At long last getting back to continuing this project on tracking commercial aircraft… Having covered ADS-B, the Raspberry Pi, DUMP1090, Zookeeper and Kafka and then in the previous blog post, how to develop an Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) application to...
Commercial passenger plane with Vertica painted on the tail

Blog Post Series: Using Vertica to Track Commercial Aircraft in near Real-Time – Part 6

Mark Whalley, Manager, Vertica Education
March 27, 2018

Part 6: Extract, Transform and Load ADS-B messages into Kafka I have discussed in previous blog posts the continuous stream of messages from aircraft transponders, captured and decoded using the DUMP1090 application, which we are planning on feeding into a series of Kafka topics, prior to loading into their corresponding tables in a Vertica database....
Commercial passenger plane with Vertica painted on the tail

Blog Post Series: Using Vertica to Track Commercial Aircraft in near Real-Time — Part 5

Mark Whalley, Manager, Vertica Education
March 8, 2018

Part Five: Apache Kafka As discussed in an earlier blog post, we have a continuous stream of messages from aircraft transponders captured and decoded using the DUMP1090 application. We now want to load this data into a series of Vertica tables. As with the streaming nature of the incoming data, with many 10s, possibly 100s...
Commercial passenger plane with Vertica painted on the tail

Blog Post Series: Using Vertica to Track Commercial Aircraft in near Real-Time — Part 4

Mark Whalley, Manager, Vertica Education
February 13, 2018

Part Four: Installing DUMP1090 to decode ADS-B messages The preceding blog post detailed the hardware requirements used in this project for tracking commercial aircraft in near real-time. In this blog post I will touch on installing the operating system on the Raspberry Pi (RPI) and the DUMP1090 software used for decoding the ADS-B signals being...
Commercial passenger plane with Vertica painted on the tail

Blog Post Series: Using Vertica to Track Commercial Aircraft in near Real-Time — Part 3

Mark Whalley, Manager, Vertica Education
December 5, 2017

Building a Raspberry Pi to Capture ADS-B signals Picking apples, pears, blackberries or raspberries In a previous blog post, I provided a very high-level overview of ADS-B, and that with the appropriate pieces of hardware and some open-source software, it was possible to capture and decode the radio signals being broadcast from commercial aircraft, with...
Commercial passenger plane with Vertica painted on the tail

Blog Post Series: Using Vertica to Track Commercial Aircraft in near Real Time –Part 2

Mark Whalley, Manager, Vertica Education
November 14, 2017

Part Two: Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) A Source of Streaming Data If you're joining us a new reader, be sure to read part one of this series to get up to speed! When looking for a topic to use in the first of The Lab Series’ mini projects for the Big Data and...

IoT Analytics with Open Source and Vertica – Tracking Commercial Aircraft in near Real Time — Part 1

Mark Whalley, Manager, Vertica Education
October 26, 2017

Project Overview This post presents an overview of an ongoing series that focuses on using Vertica, Raspberry Pi, and Apache Kafka to track commercial aircraft in near-real time. Often, people try to understand how to do IoT data analytics with their tool of choice, such as Vertica. Doing so can present some difficulty, especially if...