Highlights from writing a data sheet for JethroData

A couple of weeks ago, my friends at JethroData asked me to help them out writing a technical data sheet.

Now, JethroData product is a SQL engine for Hadoop, currently in private beta, that has a very different design and architecture than the rest of the crowd. Specifically, it actually always indexes all the columns of your tables, and also uses HDFS as a shared, remote storage instead of running locally on the data nodes. It has some very good reasons to work this way, but being radically different has made it harder to explain.

So, my task was to write a technical data sheet that would help technical people switch from “this is an insane nonsense” to “that actually makes sense in these cases, but how do you handle this or that…”. In other words, tell a consistent technical story that makes sense and highlights their strengths, encouraging readers to engage further.

I think data sheets in general are a piece of paper you get from a vendor at their booth, and quickly browse through them later while you are stuck at a boring presentation (or is it just me?). So, they have to be interesting and appealing. Also, due to their short format, they should be very focused on the main values and not too high-level or low-level. Quite a challenge!

To overcome the challenge, I first needed deeper knowledge regarding the product. For that, I spent some time with JethroData team, especially with Boaz Raufman, their co-founder and CTO. I have grilled him with questions on architecture and functionality, which led to great discussions. While of course some functionality is still lacking at this early phase, I was impressed to see that the core architecture is designed to handle quite a lot.

Then came the harder part – focus. There are many ways to use JethroData, its implementation has various advantages in different scenarios and of course, the implementation has many details, each with some logic behind it. It is impossible to cram it all into a two-page datasheet, even if most of it is very important. So, I had several lively discussions with Eli Singer, JethroData CEO, of everything from positioning to many specific strengths and supporting arguments and their relative importance.

At the end of the day, I think we got something pretty sweet. You can read it on their web site technology page. If you are attending Strata/Hadoop World, JethroData team will be on the Startup Showcase on Monday and in booth #75 Tuesday-Wednesday – bring questions and arguments 🙂