Real-World Hadoop

Chapter 3. Understanding the MapR Distribution for Apache Hadoop

The Hadoop distribution provided by MapR Technologies contains Apache Hadoop and more. We’re not just talking about the Hadoop ecosystem tools that ship with MapR—there are many, including almost all of those described in Chapter 2—but rather some special capabilities of MapR itself. These MapR-specific characteristics are the topic of this chapter because the real-world stories in this book are based on how MapR customers are using Apache Hadoop and the MapR NoSQL database, MapR-DB, to meet their large-scale computing needs in a variety of projects. The goal is to show you the benefits of Hadoop when used for the right jobs.

To make sure that you get the most out of this book, regardless of what kind of Hadoop distribution you use, we alert you to any aspects of the use cases we describe here that are not directly generalizable because of extra features of MapR not included in other distributions. For example, MapR is API-compatible with Hadoop, so applications written to run on Hadoop will run on MapR, but, in addition, non-Hadoop applications will also run on MapR, and that’s unusual. We will describe how you might work around these issues if you are not using MapR.

Use of Existing Non-Hadoop Applications

One of the key distinctions with MapR is that it has a realtime, fully read-write filesystem. This means that you not only can interact with data stored on the cluster via Hadoop commands and applications, but you ...