National Pension System (NPS) - India

The National Pension System (NPS) in India has been pushed for some time now. Government has been trying to increase the scope of the scheme, and hardly been successful at that.

One of the primary reasons has been the low cost structure for the Pension fund managers. While a regular mutual fund charges around 1.5% for the fund management effort, NPS fund managers were charging somewhere between 0.0009% to 0.25%.  At such low costs, it would have made little sense for anybody to be in business.

However, some of the fund managers persisted and are in relatively better standing today.  Some of them who did not continue (e.g. IDFC) continue to observe from a distance.

Over the last few years, returns from the NPS fund managers have been surpassing the general market returns, mostly in all categories.

Also, recently, govt regulations allowed hiking the fund management charges to 0.25%  in addition to allowing partial withdrawals from the NPS corpus.  Both of these measures have flamed the interest in NPS.  By and large, people are now taking notice of the possibility of considering NPS as a possible investment vehicle. 

Slowly, but surely, many private sector companies are also adopting the NPS route for their employees.  Beyond the long term investment option, NPS offers an instant benefit in terms of tax benefit above and beyond 80C.  10% of your Basic Salary + DA is the cap for Tax benefit under NPS. 

Therefore effectively, who falls in the 30% tax bracket, stands to shave of a substantial amount from his taxable income.  Furthermore, the returns on this additional investment are not as measly as the EPF (approx 8-9%), but much more controlled (you can chose ur fund options) and market linked.

All these measures are slowly resurrecting NPS as a possible investment vehicle.

Proud - Cloudera Certified Developer for Apache Hadoop

I have not been a believer of certifications, that should be clear from the fact that even though I have been working with Informatica since 2002, I never tried their certification till 2011. And, same about Oracle, whose exam I have not yet attempted/planned/thought over. I used to think that the knowledge level will prevail anyway, whether or not an authority stamps on it.

However, I believe, I am changing, to a certain extent so to say.  It seems that I have come to accept the certifications' worth, and therefore, after the training provided by Cloudera, I picked up the opportunity and went through with the rigor of examination.

Fortunately, I came through.  And, as much as I try not to showcase it, its a great feeling.  Somehow, the knowledge is vindicated, that yes, this guy knows something about hadoop and you better listen to him, :) . Funny that one has to put a badge out there to be heard.

Well, all said and done, the certification is done, courtesy the employer, who sponsored the training and of course the examination coupon that came along.  I would like to thank our trainer from cloudera, Amandeep Khurana for his depth and breadth around all things hadoop.  As much as I knew about hadoop before going in the training, those 2.5 days added precious layers to my knowledge.  Thanks Amandeep.

Removing ports from an existing mapping - Do's and Dont's

Recently, a colleague called in for an issue that he was facing with an Informatica mapping. Let me recreate that situation here -

There is a mapping that get n ports from a source and loads m ports to a target. Standard stuff, nothing special or fishy around there. There comes a change request that says, such and such x number of columns are not required in the target, and since there would be a sure performance penalty for carrying through extra data (however small), the mapping should be changed to remove those ports from the pipeline.

What this gentleman did was to remove the connections for those ports from the source qualifier onwards. That saved him from changing and re-importing the source definition.

However, the mapping execution failed, complaining about a certain error situation. Thats when I got the call :)

whether I could discuss and fix it is something else, but what was the reason of the error - ?  

The very fact that if you are bringing in certain ports in the source qualifier, you HAVE to take them forward.  Thats a rule from informatica's side. Which means, if you are pulling up n ports from the source, you HAVE to expose all those n ports going away from the source qualifier. Or, putting it differently, in whichever way you create a set of ports in your source qualifier, all of them have to be consumed by some transformation object. Not a single one can be left unconnected, on the input side or the output side. Simple.

That was the reason, and the solution was fairly simple, to reduce his effort, either remove the ports from source qualifier as well, or just carry them forward to one transformation. and then drop them onwards.

Having said that, the very reason for which this whole change was initiated, the performance gain that would come through by not having the extra ports being carried forward, would come only when you remove the un-wanted ports from the source itself.

Moving an ecommerce site to Amazon Web Services

This is an interesting one.. There is an e-commerce startup, run by a dear friend.  One fine day we were chatting around and he mentioned challenges with his business. Challenges included performance, scaling and cost issues about his hosting services provider.

My instant reaction was, why dont you move to aws.. and it clicked just like that.. We decided that we'd start with the free tier, with his mysql server on amazon RDS and rest of app server functionality on the micro instance. All of which is within purview of the free tier.  Using Cloudfront we'd localize the static content, to add to the performance of content delivery. Not now, but eventually, we'd start using ELB - the load balancer for distributing load across the instances we would have.

With something like aws, planning all that is really really that straightforward.  You just have to be a bit more technically oriented to think in terms of these things and you are set for good.

We are already thinking about configuring autoscaling for the services, so that running on the micro instance doesnt become a bottleneck for the customers. With that we'd hope to achieve dynamic automatic scaling up and down the infrastructure.

We have already taken the first steps, and I am helping his venture migrate to AWS, one of my dream jobs, to be able to consult around migration / integration of Traditional systems to cloud based systems.

Teradata Interview Questions - 1

1. What is a Primary Index ?
2. What is a secondary Index ?
3. What is the need of a secondary Index ?
4. What is table skewness / skew factor?
5. what is 
1. currentperm
2. maxperm
3. peakperm
6. What is MPP ? how does teradata leverage that ?
7. What is Teradata Virtual Storage ?
8. what types of data compression does Teradata support ?
9. What is a Clique in Teradata ?
10. What is a hot standby node in Teradata ?

Two of them together...

Hi..good morning...