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

Alternative distributions


Way back in Chapter 2, Getting Up and Running, we went to the Hadoop homepage from which we downloaded the installation package. Odd as it may seem, this is far from the only way to get Hadoop. Odder still may be the fact that most production deployments don't use the Apache Hadoop distribution.

Why alternative distributions?

Hadoop is open source software. Anyone can, providing they comply with the Apache Software License that governs Hadoop, make their own release of the software. There are two main reasons alternative distributions have been created.

Bundling

Some providers seek to build a pre-bundled distribution containing not only Hadoop but also other projects, such as Hive, HBase, Pig, and many more. Though installation of most projects is rarely difficult—with the exception of HBase, which has historically been more difficult to set up by hand—there can be subtle version incompatibilities that don't arise until a particular production workload hits the system...