Hadoop For Dummies

Chapter 1

Introducing Hadoop and Seeing What It’s Good For

In This Chapter

Seeing how Hadoop fills a need

Digging (a bit) into Hadoop’s history

Getting Hadoop for yourself

Looking at Hadoop application offerings

Organizations are flooded with data. Not only that, but in an era of incredibly cheap storage where everyone and everything are interconnected, the nature of the data we’re collecting is also changing. For many businesses, their critical data used to be limited to their transactional databases and data warehouses. In these kinds of systems, data was organized into orderly rows and columns, where every byte of information was well understood in terms of its nature and its business value. These databases and warehouses are still extremely important, but businesses are now differentiating themselves by how they’re finding value in the large volumes of data that are not stored in a tidy database.

The variety of data that’s available now to organizations is incredible: Internally, you have website clickstream data, typed notes from call center operators, e-mail and instant messaging ...