Hadoop-Related Software
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What is Hadoop Software?
Hadoop is a very unusual kind of open-source data store from the Apache Foundation. However, an entire ecosystem of products has evolved around the Hadoop data store, to the point where it has become its own technology category.
The central idea of Hadoop is that data is spread across many commodity, inexpensive servers, although there are several commercial distributions of Hadoop from Cloudera and Hortonworks who wrap services around the technology.
Unlike a traditional database, Hadoop can handle huge volumes of both structured and unstructured data including log files, streaming data, images, audio and video files. All of this data can be put into the Hadoop cluster and accessed, modified and processed in place, eliminating the need to duplicate and structure data in a traditional warehouse.
Once this huge volume of structured and unstructured data has been stored, how do you extract any value from it? Since Hadoop is not a structured database, structured query languages like SQL do not work. But Hadoop has its own data processing and query framework called MapReduce. Developers can use MapReduce to write programs that can retrieve whatever data is needed. However, MapReduce has several constraints affecting performance and a newer product like Apache Spark provides an alternative distributed computing framework, which is significantly more efficient. Similarly, products like Hive and Cloudera Impala provide a SQL-like query language, which is much easier for data analysts to learn and use.