Using Toad to pick the winner for our Hadoop Summit contest
The energy at this years Hadoop summit was amazing, and it was great to get a chance to share experiences with so many smart people.
I was asked to pick the winner from of our Hadoop World gift voucher, and obviously I didn’t want to use any low-tech methods. So I thought I’d use Toad for Cloud databases and Hbase.
Marketing gave me the entry data in a spread sheet format. I then used the Toad for Cloud Databases ODBC connectivity to map that spreadsheet as a table. This requires that we name a range in Excel, but it is pretty quick:
Once the spreadsheet is mapped to a table, we can easily copy it into a hbase table:
Now that it is in hbase I suppose I could write a Java program to pick a random row, but it’s much easier for me to use SQL. All I need to do is sort by the RAND() function and LIMIT the result to 1, as in the snippet below:
And the winner is Wai So from Ebay! Congrats!