Book Image

Hadoop Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Hadoop Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Data is arriving faster than you can process it and the overall volumes keep growing at a rate that keeps you awake at night. Hadoop can help you tame the data beast. Effective use of Hadoop however requires a mixture of programming, design, and system administration skills."Hadoop Beginner's Guide" removes the mystery from Hadoop, presenting Hadoop and related technologies with a focus on building working systems and getting the job done, using cloud services to do so when it makes sense. From basic concepts and initial setup through developing applications and keeping the system running as the data grows, the book gives the understanding needed to effectively use Hadoop to solve real world problems.Starting with the basics of installing and configuring Hadoop, the book explains how to develop applications, maintain the system, and how to use additional products to integrate with other systems.While learning different ways to develop applications to run on Hadoop the book also covers tools such as Hive, Sqoop, and Flume that show how Hadoop can be integrated with relational databases and log collection.In addition to examples on Hadoop clusters on Ubuntu uses of cloud services such as Amazon, EC2 and Elastic MapReduce are covered.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Hadoop Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introducing Apache Flume


Flume, found at http://flume.apache.org, is another Apache project with tight Hadoop integration and we will explore it for the remainder of this chapter.

Before we explain what Flume can do, let's make it clear what it is not. Flume is described as a system for the retrieval and distribution of logs, meaning line-oriented textual data. It is not a generic data-distribution platform; in particular, don't look to use it for the retrieval or movement of binary data.

However, since the vast majority of the data processed in Hadoop matches this description, it is likely that Flume will meet many of your data retrieval needs.

Note

Flume is also not a generic data serialization framework like Avro that we used in Chapter 5, Advanced MapReduce Techniques, or similar technologies such as Thrift and Protocol Buffers . As we'll see, Flume makes assumptions about the data format and provides no ways of serializing data outside of these.

Flume provides mechanisms for retrieving...