We're on iteration 2 for this course, and it's still in somewhat rough shape. If you plan to devote significant time to the lectures, I'd recommend waiting until next spring, when we'll be teaching iteration 3 online at http://ds-class.org.
from my perspective, a single user interface paradigm is unlikely to cover the variety of use cases that the full suite of hadoop platform services (flume, sqoop, hdfs, mapreduce, hive, pig, oozie, hbase) provides.
at cloudera, we've built and released into open source a user interface construction kit and an environment to house these various "applications". that way we can incorporate any metaphor you'd like: file browser, spreadsheet, yahoo pipes, etc.
After participating in a few of the XLDB meetups, at which the requirements for and design of SciDB were debated and discussed, I was quite excited about this project. I was kicked off of the mailing list unceremoniously once they decided they wanted to make it a business, and I haven't been allowed back on since. They're certainly abusing the term "open source" for marketing purposes here.
The reason they don't want people looking behind the curtain is that the rhetoric far exceeds the reality.
We're on iteration 2 for this course, and it's still in somewhat rough shape. If you plan to devote significant time to the lectures, I'd recommend waiting until next spring, when we'll be teaching iteration 3 online at http://ds-class.org.
Later, Jeff