I would like to thank my wife, Bimalee, my son, Kaveen, and my daughter, Yasali, for putting up with me for all the missing family time and for providing me with love and encouragement throughout the writing period. I would also like to thank my parents and siblings. Without their love, guidance, and encouragement, I would not be where I am today.

I really appreciate the contributions from my coauthor, Dr. Srinath Perera, for the first edition of this book. Many of his contributions from the first edition of this book have been adapted to the current book even though he wasn't able to coauthor this book due to his work and family commitments.

I would like to thank the Hadoop, HBase, Mahout, Pig, Hive, Sqoop, Nutch, and Lucene communities for developing great open source products. Thanks to Apache Software Foundation for fostering vibrant open source communities.

Big thanks to the editorial staff at Packt for providing me with the opportunity to write this book and feedback and guidance throughout the process. Thanks to the reviewers of this book for the many useful suggestions and corrections.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all the mentors I have had over the years, including Prof. Geoffrey Fox, Dr. Chris Groer, Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, Prof. Dennis Gannon, Prof. Judy Qiu, Prof. Beth Plale, and all my professors at Indiana University and University of Moratuwa for all the knowledge and guidance they gave me. Thanks to all my past and present colleagues for the many insightful discussions we've had and the knowledge they shared with me..