Hadoop Gaining Ground on RDBMS Like a Smart Car Climbing Pike’s Peak
September 6, 2011
Open-source Apache Hadoop software is co-existing on the market with the more established RDBMS for relational database management. Computer World reports in, “Hadoop Growing, Not Replacing RDBMS in Enterprises.” We learned:
Hadoop is designed to help companies manage and process petabytes of data. Much of the technology’s appeal lies in its ability to break up very large data sets into smaller data blocks that are then distributed across a cluster of commodity hardware for faster processing. Early adopters of the technology, including Facebook, Amazon, eBay and Yahoo, have been using Hadoop to store and analyze petabytes of unstructured data that conventional RDBMS setups couldn’t handle easily.
Computer World’s review is not completely negative, but rather restrictive in our view. RDBMS has organizational inertia on its side, an obstacle any newcomer has to conquer. RDBMS is entrenched in the rigid world of transaction data, customer information, and call records. However, Hadoop is adept in creative sectors such as event data, search engine results, and text and multimedia content from social media sites. Security concerns are also cited, although as adoption becomes more widespread those concerns are sure to lessen.
Our view is that in the present financial environment, open source is likely to suffer severe pressures. Giant, for profit companies will want to capitalize on open source goodness and then implement a fiercely commercial pricing model for services, training, consulting, engineering, and proprietary extensions. Big money will lure key developers, and the “community” may be subject to London, UK style dissention. Yikes!
Emily Rae Aldridge, September 6, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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