October 13, 2010 – Hadoop began as a tool for indexing Web pages. Now the open source framework is being marketed as a tool that could house and analyze vast amounts of data with the kind of proportions that would quickly overwhelm traditional database systems and data warehouses.
This news was brought to our attention by IDG news in their article, “Hadoop Pitched for Business Intelligence.” An increasing number of software companies are offering more support for the technology, which could attract more business users. For instance, Yahoo has just released a number of enhancements to make the technology more appropriate for enterprise use. Yahoo, in fact, is one of Hadoop’s biggest users. The company uses the technology in a variety of ways, including as a sort of a very large data warehouse.
However, Hadoop does have latency issues. Because of its distributed nature, Hadoop is not as fast as other business intelligence systems. They do argue that Hadoop should not be considered as an alternative to a transactional database system or a data warehouse, but rather something that can do tasks that these technologies would struggle to execute.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
