Beyond MapReduce: Hadoop hangs on

[Sabre]

The Register

Open ... and Shut Hadoop is all the rage in enterprise computing, and has become the poster child for the big-data movement. But just as the enterprise consolidates around Hadoop, the web world, including Google – which originated the technology ideas behind Hadoop – is moving on to real-time, ad-hoc analytics that batch-oriented Hadoop can't match.

Is Hadoop already outdated?

As Cloudant chief scientist Mike Miller points out, Google's MapReduce approach to big data analytics may already be passé. It certainly is at Google:

[Google's MapReduce] no longer holds such prominence in the Google stack... Google seems to be moving past it. In fact, many of the technologies [Google now uses like Percolator for incremental indexing and analysis of frequently changing datasets and Dremel for ad-hoc analytics] aren’t even new; they date back the second half of the last decade, mere years after the seminal [MapReduce] paper was in print.
By one estimate, Hadoop, which is an open-source implementation of Google's MapReduce technology, hasn't even caught up to Google's original MapReduce framework. And now people like Miller are arguing that a MapReduce approach to Big Data is the wrong starting point altogether.

For a slow-moving enterprise, what to do?

The good news is that soon most enterprises likely won't have to bother with Hadoop at all, as Hadoop will be baked into the cloud applications that enterprises buy. And as those vendors figure out better technologies to handle real-time (like Storm) or ad hoc analysis (like Dremel), they, too, will be baked into cloud applications.

...

They do make some compelling arguments. Back when I was doing some "big data" work, we looked at Hadoop and used it for some things, but not for real time stuff. I hadn't looked at Storm, but definitely will now.

[PGT]

Greenplum, Cloudera, one of those? I will say...from my perspective, "big data" has had an astronomical rise in the last 6-9 months. We're seeing a lot more activity and requests for capabilities.