Kathleen Ting has a preview of Apache Sqoop 2, it's getting easier to deploy Octopress on Heroku, and Todd Hoff over at the High Scalability Blog has a look at Peregrine, a possible challenger to Hadoop.

Highlights of Sqoop2 – Apache Sqoop is a project for efficiently transferring bulk data between Hadoop and external data stores. Ting looks at some of the challenges for the current iteration of Sqoop, and how Sqoop 2 is supposed to solve these problems.

Deploying Octopress to Heroku With a Custom Buildpack – Octopress is a content management framework that uses Jeckyll. If you've been thinking about setting up a blog using Octopress, Jason Garber has put together a Heroku buildpack to make it (almost) dead easy.

Peregrine: A Map Reduce Framework For Iterative And Pipelined Jobs – Todd Hoff has an interview with Kevin Burton on Peregrine's 0.5.0 release. Peregrine is a map reduce framework alternative to Hadoop that's optimized for iterative and pipelined map reduce jobs.

Distribute – a middleware-based API to perform request routing / load-balancing in Node.js. On GitHub under the MIT license.

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