Prev
www.odbms.org, Apr 4, 2011, by Roberto V. Zicari, Editor
Roberto asked Michael Olson, CEO of
Cloudera
a number of questions on Hadoop, why
it is important, and how it is used for business.
"You should think of Hadoop in kind of the same way that you think of a relational database. All by itself, it's a general-purpose platform for storing and operating on data. What makes the platform really valuable is the application that runs on top of it." says Olson.
"These days, data comes from machines talking to machines. The
servers, switches, routers and disks on your LAN are all
furiously conversing. The content of their messages is
interesting, and also the patterns and timing of the messages
that they send to one another. (In fact, if you can capture all
that data and do some pattern detection and machine learning, you
have a pretty good tool for finding bad guys breaking into your
network.) Same is true for programmed trading on Wall Street,
mobile telephony and many other pieces of technology
infrastructure we rely on.
Hadoop knows how to capture and store that data cheaply and
reliably, even if you get to petabytes." explains Olson.
When asked by looking at three elements: Data, Platform, and Analysis, what are the main business and technical challenges ahead, Michael Olson comments: "Data is the big one. Seriously: More. More complex, more variable, more useful if you can figure out what's locked up in it. More than you can imagine, even if you take this statement into account."
The full text of the interview is available at the ODBMS Industry Watch Blog: