Strata Standards Stories: Different Stores For Different Chores

Has HDFS joined MapReduce in the emerging “legacy Hadoop project” category, continuing the swap-out of components that formerly answered the question “what is Hadoop?” Stores for data were certainly a focus at Strata/Hadoop World in NY, O’Reilly’s well-run, well-attended, and always impactful fall event. The limitations of HDFS, including its append-only nature, have become inconvenient enough toContinue reading “Strata Standards Stories: Different Stores For Different Chores”

Hadoop is in the Mind of the Beholder

This post was jointly authored by Merv Adrian (@merv) and Nick Heudecker (@nheudecker) and appears on both of our Gartner blogs. In the early days of Hadoop (versions up through 1.x), the project consisted of two primary components: HDFS and MapReduce. One thing to store the data in an append-only file model, distributed across anContinue reading “Hadoop is in the Mind of the Beholder”

Hadoop Summit Recap Part Two – SELECT FROM hdfs WHERE bigdatavendor USING SQL

Probably the most widespread, and commercially imminent, theme at the Summit was “SQL on Hadoop.” Since last year, many offerings have been touted, debated, and some have even shipped. In this post, I offer a brief look at where things stood at the Summit and how we got there. To net it out: offerings todayContinue reading “Hadoop Summit Recap Part Two – SELECT FROM hdfs WHERE bigdatavendor USING SQL”

Open Source “Purity,” Hadoop, and Market Realities

I don’t often do a pure opinion piece but I feel compelled to weigh in on a queston I’ve been asked several times since EMC released its Pivotal HD recently. The question is whether it is somehow inappropriate, even “evil,” for EMC to enter the market without having “enough” committers to open source Apache projects.Continue reading “Open Source “Purity,” Hadoop, and Market Realities”

Hadoop 2013 – Part Four: Players

The first three posts in this series talked about performance,  projects and platforms as key themes in what is beginning to feel like a  watershed year for Hadoop. All three are reflected in the surprising emergence of a number of new players on the scene, as well as some new offerings from additional ones, which I’ll cover in another post. Intel, WANdisco,Continue reading “Hadoop 2013 – Part Four: Players”

Hadoop 2013 – Part Three: Platforms

In the first two posts in this series, I talked about performance and projects as key themes in Hadoop’s watershed year. As it moves squarely into the mainstream, organizations making their first move to experiment will have to make a choice of platform. And – arguably for the first time in the early mainstreaming of an information technology wave – thatContinue reading “Hadoop 2013 – Part Three: Platforms”

Hadoop 2013 – Part One: Performance

It’s no surprise that we’ve been treated to many year-end lists and predictions for Hadoop (and everything else IT) in 2013. I’ve never been that much of a fan of those exercises, but I’ve been asked so much lately that I’ve succumbed. Herewith, the first of a series of posts on what I see asContinue reading “Hadoop 2013 – Part One: Performance”

Apache Hadoop 1.0 Doesn’t Clear Up Trunks and Branches Questions. Do Distributions?

In early January 2012, the world of big data was treated to an interesting series of product releases, press announcements, and blog posts about Hadoop versions.  To begin with, we had the announcement of Apache version 1.0 at long last, in a press release. Although there were grumblings here and there in the twittersphere thatContinue reading “Apache Hadoop 1.0 Doesn’t Clear Up Trunks and Branches Questions. Do Distributions?”

Hadoop Distributions And Kids’ Soccer

The big players are moving in for a piece of the big data action.  IBM, EMC, and NetApp have stepped up their messaging, in part to prevent startup upstarts like Cloudera from cornering the Apache Hadoop distribution market. They are all elbowing one another to get closest to “pure Apache” while still “adding value.” NumerousContinue reading “Hadoop Distributions And Kids’ Soccer”

Microsoft Leaps Late, Lags with SQL Server PDW

Microsoft chose a user group meeting, Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), for the rollout of its long-awaited, and late, SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse (note, yet again, how foolish it is for vendors to trap themselves with dates in product names.) PDW is late to market; there are other MPP DBMS playersContinue reading “Microsoft Leaps Late, Lags with SQL Server PDW”