Hadoop Interview Questions
Hadoop Interview Questions
Big Data is nothing but an assortment of such a huge and complex data that it becomes very
tedious to capture, store, process, retrieve and analyze it with the help of on-hand database
management tools or traditional data processing techniques.
There are many real life examples of Big Data! Facebook is generating 500+ terabytes of data
per day, NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) generates about 1 terabyte of new trade data per
day, a jet airline collects 10 terabytes of censor data for every 30 minutes of flying time. All
these are day to day examples of Big Data!
Can you give a detailed overview about the Big Data being generated by Facebook?
As of December 31, 2012, there are 1.06 billion monthly active users on facebook and 680
million mobile users. On an average, 3.2 billion likes and comments are posted every day on
Facebook. 72% of web audience is on Facebook. And why not! There are so many activities
going on facebook from wall posts, sharing images, videos, writing comments and liking posts,
etc. In fact, Facebook started using Hadoop in mid-2009 and was one of the initial users of
Hadoop.
With time, data volume is growing exponentially. Earlier we used to talk about Megabytes or
Gigabytes. But time has arrived when we talk about data volume in terms of terabytes, petabytes
and also zettabytes! Global data volume was around 1.8ZB in 2011 and is expected to be 7.9ZB
in 2015. It is also known that the global information doubles in every two years!
Effective analysis of Big Data provides a lot of business advantage as organizations will learn
which areas to focus on and which areas are less important. Big data analysis provides some
early key indicators that can prevent the company from a huge loss or help in grasping a great
opportunity with open hands! A precise analysis of Big Data helps in decision making! For
instance, nowadays people rely so much on Facebook and Twitter before buying any product or
service. All thanks to the Big Data explosion.
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Who are ‘Data Scientists’?
Data scientists are soon replacing business analysts or data analysts. Data scientists are experts
who find solutions to analyze data. Just as web analysis, we have data scientists who have good
business insight as to how to handle a business challenge. Sharp data scientists are not only
involved in dealing business problems, but also choosing the relevant issues that can bring value-
addition to the organization.
What is Hadoop?
Hadoop is a framework that allows for distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of
commodity computers using a simple programming model.
Hadoop doesn’t have any expanding version like ‘oops’. The charming yellow elephant you see
is basically named after Doug’s son’s toy elephant!
Everyday a large amount of unstructured data is getting dumped into our machines. The major
challenge is not to store large data sets in our systems but to retrieve and analyze the big data in
the organizations, that too data present in different machines at different locations. In this
situation a necessity for Hadoop arises. Hadoop has the ability to analyze the data present in
different machines at different locations very quickly and in a very cost effective way. It uses the
concept of MapReduce which enables it to divide the query into small parts and process them in
parallel. This is also known as parallel computing.
The link Why Hadoop gives you a detailed explanation about why Hadoop is gaining so much
popularity!
Hadoop framework is written in Java. It is designed to solve problems that involve analyzing
large data (e.g. petabytes). The programming model is based on Google’s MapReduce. The
infrastructure is based on Google’s Big Data and Distributed File System. Hadoop handles large
files/data throughput and supports data intensive distributed applications. Hadoop is scalable as
more nodes can be easily added to it.
A lot of companies are using the Hadoop structure such as Cloudera, EMC, MapR, Hortonworks,
Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Twitter, Google and so on.
Traditional RDBMS is used for transactional systems to report and archive the data,
whereas Hadoop is an approach to store huge amount of data in the distributed file system and
process it. RDBMS will be useful when you want to seek one record from Big data, whereas,
Hadoop will be useful when you want Big data in one shot and perform analysis on that later.
Structured data is the data that is easily identifiable as it is organized in a structure. The most
common form of structured data is a database where specific information is stored in tables, that
is, rows and columns. Unstructured data refers to any data that cannot be identified easily. It
could be in the form of images, videos, documents, email, logs and random text. It is not in the
form of rows and columns.
Core components of Hadoop are HDFS and MapReduce. HDFS is basically used to store large
data sets and MapReduce is used to process such large data sets.
What is HDFS?
HDFS is a file system designed for storing very large files with streaming data access patterns,
running clusters on commodity hardware.
HDFS is highly fault-tolerant, with high throughput, suitable for applications with large data sets,
streaming access to file system data and can be built out of commodity hardware.
Suppose you have a file stored in a system, and due to some technical problem that file gets
destroyed. Then there is no chance of getting the data back present in that file. To avoid such
situations, Hadoop has introduced the feature of fault tolerance in HDFS. In Hadoop, when we
store a file, it automatically gets replicated at two other locations also. So even if one or two of
the systems collapse, the file is still available on the third system.
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Replication causes data redundancy then why is is pursued in HDFS?
HDFS works with commodity hardware (systems with average configurations) that has high
chances of getting crashed any time. Thus, to make the entire system highly fault-tolerant, HDFS
replicates and stores data in different places. Any data on HDFS gets stored at atleast 3 different
locations. So, even if one of them is corrupted and the other is unavailable for some time for any
reason, then data can be accessed from the third one. Hence, there is no chance of losing the data.
This replication factor helps us to attain the feature of Hadoop called Fault Tolerant.
Since the data is replicated thrice in HDFS, does it mean that any calculation done on one
node will also be replicated on the other two?
Since there are 3 nodes, when we send the MapReduce programs, calculations will be done only
on the original data. The master node will know which node exactly has that particular data. In
case, if one of the nodes is not responding, it is assumed to be failed. Only then, the required
calculation will be done on the second replica.
Throughput is the amount of work done in a unit time. It describes how fast the data is getting
accessed from the system and it is usually used to measure performance of the system. In HDFS,
when we want to perform a task or an action, then the work is divided and shared among
different systems. So all the systems will be executing the tasks assigned to them independently
and in parallel. So the work will be completed in a very short period of time. In this way, the
HDFS gives good throughput. By reading data in parallel, we decrease the actual time to read
data tremendously.
As HDFS works on the principle of ‘Write Once, Read Many‘, the feature of streaming access is
extremely important in HDFS. HDFS focuses not so much on storing the data but how
to retrieve it at the fastest possible speed, especially while analyzing logs. In HDFS, reading the
complete data is more important than the time taken to fetch a single record from the data.
What is a Namenode?
Namenode is the master node on which job tracker runs and consists of the metadata. It
maintains and manages the blocks which are present on the datanodes. It is a high-availability
machine and single point of failure in HDFS.
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Is Namenode also a commodity?
No. Namenode can never be a commodity hardware because the entire HDFS rely on it. It is the
single point of failure in HDFS. Namenode has to be a high-availability machine.
What is a metadata?
Metadata is the information about the data stored in datanodes such as location of the file, size of
the file and so on.
What is a Datanode?
Datanodes are the slaves which are deployed on each machine and provide the actual storage.
These are responsible for serving read and write requests for the clients.
Why do we use HDFS for applications having large data sets and not when there are lot of
small files?
HDFS is more suitable for large amount of data sets in a single file as compared to small amount
of data spread across multiple files. This is because Namenode is a very expensive high
performance system, so it is not prudent to occupy the space in the Namenode by unnecessary
amount of metadata that is generated for multiple small files. So, when there is a large amount of
data in a single file, name node will occupy less space. Hence for getting optimized performance,
HDFS supports large data sets instead of multiple small files.
What is a daemon?
Daemon is a process or service that runs in background. In general, we use this word in UNIX
environment. The equivalent of Daemon in Windows is “services” and in Dos is ” TSR”.
Job tracker is a daemon that runs on a namenode for submitting and tracking MapReduce jobs in
Hadoop. It assigns the tasks to the different task tracker. In a Hadoop cluster, there will be only
one job tracker but many task trackers. It is the single point of failure for Hadoop and
MapReduce Service. If the job tracker goes down all the running jobs are halted. It receives
heartbeat from task tracker based on which Job tracker decides whether the assigned task is
completed or not.
Task tracker is also a daemon that runs on datanodes. Task Trackers manage the execution of
individual tasks on slave node. When a client submits a job, the job tracker will initialize the job
and divide the work and assign them to different task trackers to perform MapReduce tasks.
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While performing this action, the task tracker will be simultaneously communicating with job
tracker by sending heartbeat. If the job tracker does not receive heartbeat from task tracker
within specified time, then it will assume that task tracker has crashed and assign that task to
another task tracker in the cluster.
It depends upon the cluster you are trying to create. The Hadoop VM can be there on the same
machine or on another machine. For instance, in a single node cluster, there is only one machine,
whereas in the development or in a testing environment, Namenode and datanodes are on
different machines.
A heartbeat is a signal indicating that it is alive. A datanode sends heartbeat to Namenode and
task tracker will send its heart beat to job tracker. If the Namenode or job tracker does not
receive heart beat then they will decide that there is some problem in datanode or task tracker is
unable to perform the assigned task.
A ‘block’ is the minimum amount of data that can be read or written. In HDFS, the default block
size is 64 MB as contrast to the block size of 8192 bytes in Unix/Linux. Files in HDFS are
broken down into block-sized chunks, which are stored as independent units. HDFS blocks are
large as compared to disk blocks, particularly to minimize the cost of seeks.
If a particular file is 50 mb, will the HDFS block still consume 64 mb as the default size?
No, not at all! 64 mb is just a unit where the data will be stored. In this particular situation, only
50 mb will be consumed by an HDFS block and 14 mb will be free to store something else. It is
the MasterNode that does data allocation in an efficient manner.
A file can be larger than any single disk in the network. There’s nothing that requires the blocks
from a file to be stored on the same disk, so they can take advantage of any of the disks in the
cluster. Making the unit of abstraction a block rather than a file simplifies the storage
subsystem. Blocks provide fault tolerance and availability. To insure against corrupted blocks
and disk and machine failure, each block is replicated to a small number of physically separate
machines (typically three). If a block becomes unavailable, a copy can be read from another
location in a way that is transparent to the client.
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If we want to copy 10 blocks from one machine to another, but another machine can copy
only 8.5 blocks, can the blocks be broken at the time of replication?
In HDFS, blocks cannot be broken down. Before copying the blocks from one machine to
another, the Master node will figure out what is the actual amount of space required, how many
block are being used, how much space is available, and it will allocate the blocks accordingly.
Hadoop has its own way of indexing. Depending upon the block size, once the data is stored,
HDFS will keep on storing the last part of the data which will say where the next part of the data
will be. In fact, this is the base of HDFS.
When data is stored in datanode, then the metadata of that data will be stored in the Namenode.
So Namenode will identify if the data node is full.
While installing the Hadoop system, Namenode is determined based on the size of the clusters.
Most of the time, we do not need to upgrade the Namenode because it does not store the actual
data, but just the metadata, so such a requirement rarely arise.
Yes, job tracker and task tracker are present in different machines. The reason is job tracker is a
single point of failure for the Hadoop MapReduce service. If it goes down, all running jobs are
halted.
When we send a data to a node, do we allow settling in time, before sending another data to
that node?
Yes, we do.
As the Namenode has the metadata (information) related to all the data nodes, it knows which
datanode is free.
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Yes, Google owns a DFS known as “Google File System (GFS)” developed by Google Inc. for
its own use.
A user is like you or me, who has some query or who needs some kind of data.
No, Client is an application which runs on your machine, which is used to interact with the
Namenode (job tracker) or datanode (task tracker).
What is a rack?
Rack is a storage area with all the datanodes put together. These datanodes can be physically
located at different places. Rack is a physical collection of datanodes which are stored at a single
location. There can be multiple racks in a single location.
When the client is ready to load a file into the cluster, the content of the file will be divided into
blocks. Now the client consults the Namenode and gets 3 datanodes for every block of the file
which indicates where the block should be stored. While placing the datanodes, the key rule
followed is “for every block of data, two copies will exist in one rack, third copy in a different
rack“. This rule is known as “Replica Placement Policy“.
If both rack2 and datanode present in rack 1 fails then there is no chance of getting data from it.
In order to avoid such situations, we need to replicate that data more number of times instead of
replicating only thrice. This can be done by changing the value in replication factor which is set
to 3 by default.
The secondary Namenode constantly reads the data from the RAM of the Namenode and writes
it into the hard disk or the file system. It is not a substitute to the Namenode, so if the Namenode
fails, the entire Hadoop system goes down.
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What is the difference between Gen1 and Gen2 Hadoop with regards to the Namenode?
In Gen 1 Hadoop, Namenode is the single point of failure. In Gen 2 Hadoop, we have what is
known as Active and Passive Namenodes kind of a structure. If the active Namenode fails,
passive Namenode takes over the charge.
What is MapReduce?
Map Reduce is the ‘heart‘ of Hadoop that consists of two parts – ‘map’ and ‘reduce’. Maps and
reduces are programs for processing data. ‘Map’ processes the data first to give some
intermediate output which is further processed by ‘Reduce’ to generate the final output.
Thus, MapReduce allows for distributed processing of the map and reduction operations.
Namenode takes the input and divide it into parts and assign them to data nodes. These
datanodes process the tasks assigned to them and make a key-value pair and returns the
intermediate output to the Reducer. The reducer collects this key value pairs of all the datanodes
and combines them and generates the final output.
Key value pair is the intermediate data generated by maps and sent to reduces for generating the
final output.
HDFS cluster is the name given to the whole configuration of master and slaves where data is
stored. Map Reduce Engine is the programming module which is used to retrieve and analyze
data.
Yes, we need two different servers for the Namenode and the datanodes. This is because
Namenode requires highly configurable system as it stores information about the location details
of all the files stored in different datanodes and on the other hand, datanodes require low
configuration system.
The number of maps is equal to the number of input splits because we want the key and value
pairs of all the input splits.
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Is a job split into maps?
No, a job is not split into maps. Spilt is created for the file. The file is placed on datanodes in
blocks. For each split, a map is needed.
There are two types of writes in HDFS: posted and non-posted write. Posted Write is when we
write it and forget about it, without worrying about the acknowledgement. It is similar to our
traditional Indian post. In a Non-posted Write, we wait for the acknowledgement. It is similar to
the today’s courier services. Naturally, non-posted write is more expensive than the posted write.
It is much more expensive, though both writes are asynchronous.
Reading is done in parallel because by doing so we can access the data fast. But we do not
perform the write operation in parallel. The reason is that if we perform the write operation in
parallel, then it might result in data inconsistency. For example, you have a file and two nodes
are trying to write data into the file in parallel, then the first node does not know what the second
node has written and vice-versa. So, this makes it confusing which data to be stored and
accessed.
Though NOSQL is the closet technology that can be compared to Hadoop, it has its own pros
and cons. There is no DFS in NOSQL. Hadoop is not a database. It’s a filesystem (HDFS) and
distributed programming framework (MapReduce).
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are deemed to have failed and the work is scheduled on a different TaskTracker.
A TaskTracker will notify the JobTracker when a task fails. The JobTracker decides what to do
then: it may resubmit the job elsewhere, it may mark that specific record as something to avoid,
and it may may even blacklist the TaskTracker as unreliable.
What is a Task Tracker in Hadoop? How many instances of TaskTracker run on a Hadoop
Cluster
A TaskTracker is a slave node daemon in the cluster that accepts tasks (Map, Reduce and Shuffle
operations) from a JobTracker. There is only One Task Tracker process run on any hadoop slave
node. Task Tracker runs on its own JVM process. Every TaskTracker is configured with a set of
slots, these indicate the number of tasks that it can accept. The TaskTracker starts a separate
JVM processes to do the actual work (called as Task Instance) this is to ensure that process
failure does not take down the task tracker. The TaskTracker monitors these task instances,
capturing the output and exit codes. When the Task instances finish, successfully or not, the task
tracker notifies the JobTracker. The TaskTrackers also send out heartbeat messages to the
JobTracker, usually every few minutes, to reassure the JobTracker that it is still alive. These
message also inform the JobTracker of the number of available slots, so the JobTracker can stay
up to date with where in the cluster work can be delegated.
What is configuration of a typical slave node on Hadoop cluster? How many JVMs run on
a slave node?
Single instance of a Task Tracker is run on each Slave node. Task tracker is run as a separate
JVM process.
Single instance of a DataNode daemon is run on each Slave node. DataNode daemon is run as
a separate JVM process.
One or Multiple instances of Task Instance is run on each slave node. Each task instance is run
as a separate JVM process. The number of Task instances can be controlled by configuration.
Typically a high end machine is configured to run more task instances.
In HDFS Data Blocks are distributed across local drives of all machines in a cluster. Whereas
in NAS data is stored on dedicated hardware.
HDFS is designed to work with MapReduce System, since computation are moved to data.
NAS is not suitable for MapReduce since data is stored seperately from the computations.
HDFS runs on a cluster of machines and provides redundancy usinga replication protocal.
Whereas NAS is provided by a single machine therefore does not provide data redundancy.
Does MapReduce programming model provide a way for reducers to communicate with
each other? In a MapReduce job can a reducer communicate with another reducer?
Nope, MapReduce programming model does not allow reducers to communicate with each other.
Reducers run in isolation.
The mapper output (intermediate data) is stored on the Local file system (NOT HDFS) of each
individual mapper nodes. This is typically a temporary directory location which can be setup in
config by the hadoop administrator. The intermediate data is cleaned up after the Hadoop Job
completes.
What is the Hadoop MapReduce API contract for a key and value Class?
The Key must implement the org.apache.hadoop.io.WritableComparable interface.
The value must implement the org.apache.hadoop.io.Writable interface.
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When is the reducers are started in a MapReduce job?
In a MapReduce job reducers do not start executing the reduce method until the all Map jobs
have completed. Reducers start copying intermediate key-value pairs from the mappers as soon
as they are available. The programmer defined reduce method is called only after all the mappers
have finished.
If reducers do not start before all mappers finish then why does the progress on MapReduce job
shows something like Map(50%) Reduce(10%)? Why reducers progress percentage is displayed
when mapper is not finished yet?
Reducers start copying intermediate key-value pairs from the mappers as soon as they are
available. The progress calculation also takes in account the processing of data transfer which is
done by reduce process, therefore the reduce progress starts showing up as soon as any
intermediate key-value pair for a mapper is available to be transferred to reducer. Though the
reducer progress is updated still the programmer defined reduce method is called only after all
the mappers have finished.
What is HDFS Block size? How is it different from traditional file system block size?
In HDFS data is split into blocks and distributed across multiple nodes in the cluster. Each block
is typically 64Mb or 128Mb in size. Each block is replicated multiple times. Default is to
replicate each block three times. Replicas are stored on different nodes. HDFS utilizes the local
file system to store each HDFS block as a separate file. HDFS Block size can not be compared
with the traditional file system block size.
Name the most common InputFormats defined in Hadoop? Which one is default ?
Following 3 are most common InputFormats defined in Hadoop
- TextInputFormat
- KeyValueInputFormat
- SequenceFileInputFormat
TextInputFormat is the hadoop default.
KeyValueInputFormat: Reads text file and parses lines into key, val pairs. Everything up to the first tab
character is sent as key to the Mapper and the remainder of the line is sent as value to the mapper.
After the Map phase finishes, the hadoop framework does "Partitioning, Shuffle and sort". Explain what
happens in this phase?
- Partitioning
Partitioning is the process of determining which reducer instance will receive which intermediate keys
and values. Each mapper must determine for all of its output (key, value) pairs which reducer will receive
them. It is necessary that for any key, regardless of which mapper instance generated it, the destination
partition is the same
- Shuffle
After the first map tasks have completed, the nodes may still be performing several more map tasks each.
But they also begin exchanging the intermediate outputs from the map tasks to where they are required by
the reducers. This process of moving map outputs to the reducers is known as shuffling.
- Sort
Each reduce task is responsible for reducing the values associated with several intermediate keys. The set
of intermediate keys on a single node is automatically sorted by Hadoop before they are presented to the
Reducer
If no custom partitioner is defined in the hadoop then how is data partitioned before its sent to the
reducer?
The default partitioner computes a hash value for the key and assigns the partition based on this result
What is a Combiner?
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The Combiner is a "mini-reduce" process which operates only on data generated by a mapper. The
Combiner will receive as input all data emitted by the Mapper instances on a given node. The output from
the Combiner is then sent to the Reducers, instead of the output from the Mappers.
Suppose Hadoop spawned 100 tasks for a job and one of the task failed. What will hadoop do ?
It will restart the task again on some other task tracker and only if the task fails more than 4 (default
setting and can be changed) times will it kill the job
Hadoop achieves parallelism by dividing the tasks across many nodes, it is possible for a few slow nodes
to rate-limit the rest of the program and slow down the program. What mechanism Hadoop provides to
combat this ?
Speculative Execution
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What is Hadoop Streaming ?
Streaming is a generic API that allows programs written in virtually any language to be used as Hadoop
Mapper and Reducer implementations
What is the characteristic of streaming API that makes it flexible run map reduce jobs in languages like
perl, ruby, awk etc. ?
Hadoop Streaming allows to use arbitrary programs for the Mapper and Reducer phases of a Map Reduce
job by having both Mappers and Reducers receive their input on stdin and emit output (key, value) pairs
on stdout.
What is the benifit of Distributed cache, why can we just have the file in HDFS and have the application
read it ?
This is because distributed cache is much faster. It copies the file to all trackers at the start of the job.
Now if the task tracker runs 10 or 100 mappers or reducer, it will use the same copy of distributed cache.
On the other hand, if you put code in file to read it from HDFS in the MR job then every mapper will try
to access it from HDFS hence if a task tracker run 100 map jobs then it will try to read this file 100 times
from HDFS. Also HDFS is not very efficient when used like this.
What mechanism does Hadoop framework provides to synchronize changes made in Distribution Cache
during runtime of the application ?
This is a trick questions. There is no such mechanism. Distributed Cache by design is read only during the
time of Job execution
Is it possible to provide multiple input to Hadoop? If yes then how can you give multiple directories as
input to the Hadoop job ?
Yes, The input format class provides methods to add multiple directories as input to a Hadoop job
Is it possible to have Hadoop job output in multiple directories. If yes then how ?
Yes, by using Multiple Outputs class
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What will a hadoop job do if you try to run it with an output directory that is already present? Will it
- overwrite it
- warn you and continue
- throw an exception and exit
The hadoop job will throw an exception and exit.
How can you set an arbitrary number of mappers to be created for a job in Hadoop ?
This is a trick question. You cannot set it
How can you set an arbitary number of reducers to be created for a job in Hadoop ?
You can either do it progamatically by using method setNumReduceTasksin the JobConfclass or set it up
as a configuration setting
Did you ever built a production process in Hadoop ? If yes then what was the process when your hadoop
job fails due to any reason?
Its an open ended question but most candidates, if they have written a production job, should talk about
some type of alert mechanisn like email is sent or there monitoring system sends an alert. Since Hadoop
works on unstructured data, its very important to have a good alerting system for errors since unexpected
data can very easily break the job.
Did you ever ran into a lop sided job that resulted in out of memory error, if yes then how did you
handled it ?
This is an open ended question but a candidate who claims to be an intermediate developer and has
worked on large data set (10-20GB min) should have run into this problem. There can be many ways to
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handle this problem but most common way is to alter your algorithm and break down the job into more
map reduce phase or use a combiner if possible.
What is HDFS?
HDFS, the Hadoop Distributed File System, is a distributed file system designed to hold very large
amounts of data (terabytes or even petabytes), and provide high-throughput access to this information.
Files are stored in a redundant fashion across multiple machines to ensure their durability to failure and
high availability to very parallel applications
What does the statement "HDFS is block structured file system" means?
It means that in HDFS individual files are broken into blocks of a fixed size. These blocks are stored
across a cluster of one or more machines with data storage capacity
What is the benefit of having such big block size (when compared to block size of linux file system like
ext)?
It allows HDFS to decrease the amount of metadata storage required per file (the list of blocks per file
will be smaller as the size of individual blocks increases). Furthermore, it allows for fast streaming reads
of data, by keeping large amounts of data sequentially laid out on the disk
Why is it recommended to have few very large files instead of a lot of small files in HDFS?
This is because the Name node contains the meta data of each and every file in HDFS and more files
means more metadata and since namenode loads all the metadata in memory for speed hence having a lot
of files may make the metadata information big enough to exceed the size of the memory on the Name
node
True/false question. What is the lowest granularity at which you can apply replication factor in HDFS
- You can choose replication factor per directory
- You can choose replication factor per file in a directory
- You can choose replication factor per block of a file
- True
- True
- False
What alternate way does HDFS provides to recover data in case a Namenode, without backup, fails and
cannot be recovered?
There is no way. If Namenode dies and there is no backup then there is no way to recover data
Describe how a HDFS client will read a file in HDFS, like will it talk to data node or namenode ... how
will data flow etc?
To open a file, a client contacts the Name Node and retrieves a list of locations for the blocks that
comprise the file. These locations identify the Data Nodes which hold each block. Clients then read file
data directly from the Data Node servers, possibly in parallel. The Name Node is not directly involved in
this bulk data transfer, keeping its overhead to a minimum.
Advantages of Hadoop?
• Bringing compute and storage together on commodity hardware: The result is blazing speed at low cost.
• Price performance: The Hadoop big data technology provides significant cost savings (think a factor of
approximately 10) with significant performance improvements (again, think factor of 10). Your mileage
may vary. If the existing technology can be so dramatically trounced, it is worth examining if Hadoop can
complement or replace aspects of your current architecture.
• Linear Scalability: Every parallel technology makes claims about scale up.Hadoop has genuine
scalability since the latest release is expanding the limit on the number of nodes to beyond 4,000.
• Full access to unstructured data: A highly scalable data store with a good parallel programming model,
MapReduce, has been a challenge for the industry for some time. Hadoop programming model does not
solve all problems, but it is a strong solution for many tasks.
At the present time, Pig infrastructure layer consists of a compiler that produces sequences of Map-
Reduce programs, for which large-scale parallel implementations already exist (e.g., the Hadoop
subproject). Pig language layer currently consists of a textual language called Pig Latin, which has the
following key properties:
Ease of programming.
It is trivial to achieve parallel execution of simple, "embarrassingly parallel" data analysis tasks. Complex
tasks comprised of multiple interrelated data transformations are explicitly encoded as data flow
sequences, making them easy to write, understand, and maintain.
Optimization opportunities.
The way in which tasks are encoded permits the system to optimize their execution automatically,
allowing the user to focus on semantics rather than efficiency.
Extensibility.
Users can create their own functions to do special-purpose processing.
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Features of Pig:
– data transformation functions
– datatypes include sets, associative arrays, tuples
– high-level language for marshalling data
- developed at yahoo!
Keypoints:
• SQL-based data warehousing application
– features similar to Pig
– more strictly SQL-type
• Supports SELECT, JOIN, GROUP BY,etc
• Analyzing very large data sets
– log processing, text mining, document indexing
• Developed at Facebook
Map Process:
In this process input is taken by the master node,which divides it into smaller tasks and distribute them to
the workers nodes. The workers nodes process these sub tasks and pass them back to the master node.
Reduce Process :
In this the master node combines all the answers provided by the worker nodes to get the results of the
original task. The main advantage of Map reduce is that the map and reduce are performed in distributed
mode. Since each operation is independent, so each map can be performed in parallel and hence reducing
the net computing time.
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What is a metadata?
Metadata is the information about the data stored in data nodes such as location of the file, size of the file
and so on.
What is a rack?
Rack is a storage area with all the datanodes put together. These datanodes can be physically located at
different places. Rack is a physical collection of datanodes which are stored at a single location. There
can be multiple racks in a single location.
History of Hadoop?
Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting, the creator of Apache Lucene, the widely used text search library.
Hadoop has its origins in Apache Nutch, an open source web search engine, itself a part of the Lucene
project.
The name Hadoop is not an acronym; it’s a made-up name. The project’s creator, Doug Cutting, explains
how the name came about:
The name my kid gave a stuffed yellow elephant. Short, relatively easy to spell and pronounce,
meaningless, and not used elsewhere: those are my naming criteria.
Subprojects and “contrib” modules in Hadoop also tend to have names that are unrelated to their function,
often with an elephant or other animal theme (“Pig,” for example). Smaller components are given more
descriptive (and therefore more mundane) names. This is a good principle, as it means you can generally
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work out what something does from its name. For example, the jobtracker keeps track of MapReduce
jobs.
MapReduce is designed to run jobs that last minutes or hours on trusted, dedicated hardware running in a
single data center with very high aggregate bandwidth interconnects. By contrast, SETI@home runs a
perpetual computation on untrusted machines on the Internet with highly variable connection speeds and
no data locality.
What is HBase?
A distributed, column-oriented database. HBase uses HDFS for its underlying storage, and supports both
batch-style computations using MapReduce and point queries (random reads).
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What is ZooKeeper?
A distributed, highly available coordination service. ZooKeeper provides primitives such as distributed
locks that can be used for building distributed applications.
What is Chukwa?
A distributed data collection and analysis system. Chukwa runs collectors that store data in HDFS, and it
uses MapReduce to produce reports. (At the time of this writing, Chukwa had only recently graduated
from a “contrib” module in Core to its own subproject.)
What is Avro?
A data serialization system for efficient, cross-language RPC, and persistent data storage. (At the time of
this writing, Avro had been created only as a new subproject, and no other Hadoop subprojects were
using it yet.)
What is a split?
Hadoop divides the input to a MapReduce job into fixed-size pieces called input splits, or just splits.
Hadoop creates one map task for each split, which runs the userdefined map function for each record in
the split.
Having many splits means the time taken to process each split is small compared to the time to process
the whole input. So if we are processing the splits in parallel, the processing is better load-balanced.
On the other hand, if splits are too small, then the overhead of managing the splits and of map task
creation begins to dominate the total job execution time. For most jobs, a good split size tends to be the
size of a HDFS block, 64 MB by default, although this can be changed for the cluster
Map tasks write their output to local disk, not to HDFS. Why is this?
Map output is intermediate output: it’s processed by reduce tasks to produce the final output, and once the
job is complete the map output can be thrown away. So storing it in HDFS, with replication, would be
overkill. If the node running the map task fails before the map output has been consumed by the reduce
task, then Hadoop will automatically rerun the map task on another node to recreate the map output.
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