Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
Industry Needs and Solutions
What You Will Learn in This Chapter
• Finding Out What Constitutes “Big Data”
• Appreciating the History and Origins of Hadoop
• Defining Hadoop
• Understanding the Core Components of Hadoop
• Looking to the Future with Hadoop 2.0
This first chapter introduces you to the open source world of Apache and to
Hadoop, one of the most exciting and innovative platforms ever created for
the data professional. In this chapter we're going to go on a bit of a journey.
You're going to find out what inspired Hadoop, where it came from, and its
future direction. You'll see how from humble beginnings two gentlemen have
inspired a generation of data professionals to think completely differently
about data processing and data architecture.
Before we look into the world of Hadoop, though, we must first ask ourselves
an important question. Why does big data exist? Is this name just a fad, or is
there substance to all the hype? Is big data here to stay? If you want to know
the answers to these questions and a little more, read on. You have quite a
journey in front of you…
What's So
Big
About Big Data?
The world has witnessed explosive, exponential growth in recent times. So,
did we suddenly have a need for big data? Not exactly. Businesses have been
tackling the capacity challenge for many years (much to the delight of storage
hardware vendors). Therefore the
big
in big data isn't purely a statement on
size.
Likewise, on the processing front, scale-out solutions such as
high-performance computing and distributed database technology have been
in place since the last millennium. There is nothing intrinsically new there
either.
