Chapter 1. Meet Hadoop
In pioneer days they used oxen for heavy pulling, and when one ox couldn’t budge a log, they didn’t try to grow a larger ox. We shouldn’t be trying for bigger computers, but for more systems of computers.
—Grace Hopper
Data!
We live in the data age. It’s not easy to measure the total volume of data stored electronically, but an IDC estimate put the size of the “digital universe” at 4.4 zettabytes in 2013 and is forecasting a tenfold growth by 2020 to 44 zettabytes.[3] A zettabyte is 1021 bytes, or equivalently one thousand exabytes, one million petabytes, or one billion terabytes. That’s more than one disk drive for every person in the world.
This flood of data is coming from many sources. Consider the following:[4]
The New York Stock Exchange generates about 4−5 terabytes of data per day.
Facebook hosts more than 240 billion photos, growing at 7 petabytes per month.
Ancestry.com, the genealogy site, stores around 10 petabytes of data.
The Internet Archive stores around 18.5 petabytes of data.
The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, produces about 30 petabytes of data per year.
So there’s a lot of data out there. But you are probably wondering how it affects you. Most of the data is locked up in the largest web properties (like search engines) or in scientific or financial institutions, isn’t it? Does the advent of big data affect smaller organizations or individuals?
I argue that it does. Take photos, for example. My wife’s grandfather was an avid photographer ...
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