While many businesses struggled to keep pace with the changing economics of a global pandemic, the real estate industry was booming. The housing market reached record-breaking heights last month, with median existing-price homes rising 17.2% over the prior year. This increase in the average cost of a house was compounded by accelerated closing times, as the average house sold in 18 days, a record low.

Let's get started with this great debate. First, a step back; we’ve pointed out that Apache Spark and Hadoop MapReduce are two different Big Data beasts. The former is a high-performance in-memory data-processing framework, and the latter is a mature batch-processing platform for the petabyte scale. We also know that Apache Hive and HBase are two very different tools with similar functions. Hive is a SQL-like engine that runs MapReduce jobs, while HBase is a NoSQL key/value database on Hadoop.

Cloudera and Accenture demonstrate strength in their relationship with an accelerator called the Smart Data Transition Toolkit for migration of legacy data warehouses into Cloudera Data Platform.

In the final episode of season two of The Data Chief podcast, we talk with authors of four must-read books for data and analytics leaders — two new and two time-tested. As you invest in your continuous learning, here is the full round up of the latest top books I recommend for today’s data and analytics leaders.