Why All the Hadoopla?
There’s a revolution happening in the use of big data, and Apache Hadoop is at the center of it.
Excitement around Hadoop has been building since its release as an open source distributed data processing platform five years ago. But within the last 18 months, Hadoop has taken off, gaining customers, commercial support options, and dozens of integrations from database and data-integration software vendors. The top three commercial database suppliers—Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft—have adopted Hadoop. IBM introduced its Hadoop-based In fo Sphere BigInsights software in May, and last month Oracle and Microsoft separately revealed plans to release Hadoop-based distributions next year. Both companies plan to provide deployment assistance and enterprisegrade support, and Oracle has promised a prebuilt Oracle Big Data Appliance with Hadoop software already installed.
Will Hadoop turn out to be as significant as SQL, introduced more than 30 years ago? Hadoop is often tagged as a technology exclusively for unstructured data. By combining scalability, flexibility, and low cost, it has become the default choice for Web giants like AOL and ComScore that are dealing with large-scale clickstream analysis and ad targeting scenarios.
But Hadoop is headed for wider use.
About the Author
Doug Henschen is executive editor of InformationWeek, where he covers the intersection of enterprise applications with information management, business intelligence, analytics and big data analysis. He previously served as editor in chief of Intelligent Enterprise and has covered IT and data-driven marketing for the last 14 years of his 29-year career in publishing.
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