Real-World Hadoop

Chapter 7. What’s Next?

We’re enthusiastic about Hadoop and NoSQL technologies as powerful and disruptive solutions to address existing and emerging challenges, and it’s no secret that we like the capabilities that the MapR distribution offers. Furthermore, we’ve based the customer stories we describe here on what MapR customers are doing with Hadoop, so it’s not surprising if this book feels a bit MapR-centric. The main message we want to convey, however, is about the stunning potential of Hadoop and its associated tools.

Seeing Hadoop in the real world shows that it has moved beyond being an interesting experimental technology that shows promise—it is living up to that promise. Regardless of which Hadoop distribution you may use, your computing horizons are wider because of it. Big data isn’t just big volume—it also changes the insights you can gain. Having a low-cost way to collect, store, and analyze very big datasets and new data formats has the potential to help you do more accurate analytics and machine learning. While Hadoop and NoSQL databases are not the only way to deal with data at this scale, they are an attractive option whose user base is growing rapidly.

As you read the use cases and tips in this book, you should recognize basic patterns of how you can use Hadoop to your advantage, both on its own and as a companion to traditional data warehouses and databases.

Those who are new to Hadoop should find that you have a better understanding of what Hadoop does well. This ...