Hadoop and Business Intelligence
October 20, 2010
InfoWorld’s Data Explosion Web page ran a destroy “Hadoop Pitched for Business Intelligence.” The Hadoop World 2010 conference was a big deal. I spoke with a start up company’s senior business development manager on his way to the event. What surprised me was this passage in the InfoWorld story:
Hadoop offers a unique tool in some circumstances, said Curt Monash of Monash Research. “Hadoop is a great tool for organizing and condensing large amounts of data before it is put into a relational database,” he said. It is also a good tool for companies to analyze relationships between people or things, a practice often known as “social graph analysis,” Monash said. “Traditional relational databases have a difficult time with this, because each hop along the graph exponentially increases the amount of work that needs to be done,” he said. But there are tradeoffs with the technology. For one, you may not want to use it for real time data analysis. Cornelius admits Hadoop has latency issues. Because of its distributed nature, Hadoop is not as fast as other BI systems. But, Cornelius and others 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. “It’s not a database. It’s a different kind of data storage and analytics platform. If you have a relational database problem, you should go buy Oracle or DB2,” agreed Mike Olson, Cloudera CEO. To better pursue the BI market, Cloudera has forged partnerships with Pentaho and data warehouse provider Teradata.
I suppose in the interest of balance, InfoWorld has to point out the flaws of Hadoop. The only problem, in my opinion, is that there are firms which have been able to use Hadoop, deliver low latency functionality, and push into territory where once the proprietary vendors ruled.
The reality of open source software is that it is available, it works, and is improving. The “problems” are not those of Hadoop. Plenty of commercial solutions have latency problems and the licensee cannot make fixes or work arounds due to licensing restrictions.
What’s this mean? Once again, the received wisdom overlooks the key strategic flaw in traditional solutions from Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. The fact is that Hadoop-type software offers a path forward, not a path to the lock in of the past. Just my opinion. Honk.
Stephen E Arnold, October 20, 2010
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