Cynthia Murrell of BeyondSearch writes:
Wired Enterprise gives us a glimpse into MapR, a new distribution for Apache Hadoop, in “Ex-Google Man Sells Search Genius to Rest of World.” The ex-Googler in this case is M.C. Srivas, who was so impressed with Google’s MapReduce platform that he decided to spread its concepts to the outside world.
Sounds great! So I head over to the MapR site and choose Unique Features of MapR Hadoop Distribution, where I find:
- Finish small jobs quickly with MapR ExpressLane
- Mount your Hadoop cluster with Direct Access NFS™
- Enable realtime data flows
- Use the MapR Heatmap™, alerts, and alarms to monitor your cluster
- Manage your data easily with Volumes
- Scale up and create an unlimited number of files
- Get jobs done faster with half the hardware
- Eliminate downtime and performance bottlenecks with Distributed NameNode HA
- Eliminate lost jobs with HA Jobtracker
- Enable Point-in-time Recovery with MapR Snapshots
- Synchronize data across clusters with Mirroring
- Let multiple jobs safely share your Hadoop cluster
- Control data placement for improved performance, security or manageability
Maybe I am missing it. Do you see any Search Genius in that list?
MapR may have improved the usability/reliability of Hadoop, which is no small thing, but disappointing when looking for better search results.
Let’s represent the original Hadoop with this Wikipedia image:
and the MapR version of Hadoop with this Wikipedia image:
It is true that the MapR version has more unique features but none of them appear to relate to search.
I am sure that Hadoop cluster managers and others will be interested in MapR (as will some of the rest of us), as managers.
As searchers, we may have to turn somewhere else. Do you disagree?
PS: Cloudera has made more contributions to the Hadoop and Apache communities than I can list in a very long post. Keep than in mind when you see ill-mannered and juvenile sniping at their approach to Hadoop.