RecordBreaker is a project that automatically turns your text-formatted data (server logs, sensor readings, etc) into structured Avro data, without any need to write parsers or extractors. Its goal is to dramatically reduce the time spent preparing data for analysis, enabling more time for the analysis itself.
You can (and should!) read the full RecordBreaker tutorial here: http://cloudera.github.com/RecordBreaker/
The RecordBreaker repository is hosted at GitHub, here: https://github.com/cloudera/RecordBreaker
One interesting part of RecordBreaker is the FishEye system. It's a web-based tool for examining and managing the diverse datasets likely to be found in a typical HDFS installation. It draws features from both filesystem management and database administration tools. Most interestingly, it uses RecordBreaker techniques to automatically figure out the structure of files it finds. You can run it by typing:
bin/learnstructure fisheye -run <portnum> <localstoragedir>
Where portnum is the HTTP port where FishEye will provide data to the user, and localstoreagedir is where it will maintain information about a target filesystem.
$ ant dist
-- Java JDK 1.6 -- Apache ant 1.8.2