RDBMS VS MAP REDUCE - hadoop

I was going through Hadoop- The definitive Guide and i came across these lines:
Normalization poses problems for MapReduce, since it makes reading a record a nonlocal operation, and one of the central assumptions that
MapReduce makes is that it is possible to perform (high-speed)
streaming reads and writes.
Can someone explain what do these lines actually mean in layman language?
I know what is Normalization. How does it make makes reading a record a nonlocal
operation? What is the meaning of a non local operation in reference to hadoop?

In hadoop a local operation refers to executing code in the same physical location where the data it needs to work with is being stored.
When you normalize your data you're essentially splitting it up. If this "split up" data gets distributed in 2 physically different areas you suddenly have non-local operations.

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Spark performance advantage vs. Hadoop MapReduce [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Why is Spark faster than Hadoop Map Reduce
(2 answers)
Closed 5 years ago.
I am hearing that Spark has an advantage over hadoop due to spark's in-memory computation. However, one of the obvious problems is not all the data can fit into one computers memory. So is Spark then limited to smaller datasets. At the same time, there is the notion of spark cluster. So I am not following the purported advantages of spark over hadoop MR.
Thanks
Hadoop MapReduce has been the mainstay on Hadoop for batch jobs for a long time. However, two very promising technologies have emerged, Apache Drill, which is a low-density SQL engine for self-service data exploration and Apache Spark, which is a general-purpose compute engine that allows you to run batch, interactive and streaming jobs on the cluster using the same unified frame. Let's dig a little bit more into Spark.
To understand Spark, you have to understand really three big concepts.
First is RDDs, the resilient distributed data sets. This is really a representation of the data that's coming into your system in an object format and allows you to do computations on top of it. RDDs are resilient because they have a long lineage. Whenever there's a failure in the system, they can recompute themselves using the prior information using lineage.
The second concept is transformations. Transformations is what you do to RDDs to get other resilient RDDs. Examples of transformations would be things like opening a file and creating an RDD or doing functions like printer that would then create other resilient RDDs.
The third and the final concept is actions. These are things which will do where you're actually asking for an answer that the system needs to provide you, for instance, count or asking a question about what's the first line that has Spark in it. The interesting thing with Spark is that it does lazy elevation which means that these RDDs are not loaded and pushed into the system as in when the system encounters an RDD but they're only done when there is actually an action to be performed.
One thing that comes up with RDDs is that when we come back to them being that they are resilient and in main memory is that how do they compare with distributed shared memory architectures and most of what are familiar from our past? There are a few differences. Let's go with them in a small, brief way. First of all, writes in RDDs are core of Spark. They are happening at an RDD level. Writes in distributor-shared memory are typically fine-grained. Reads and distributor-shared memory are fine-grained as well. Writes in RDD can be fine or course-grained.
The second piece is recovery. What happens if there is a part in the system, how do we recover it? Since RDDs build this lineage graph if something goes bad, they can go back and recompute based on that graph and regenerate the RDD. Lineage is used very strongly in RDDs to recovery. In distributor-shared memories we typically go back to check-pointing done at intervals or any other semantic check-pointing mechanism. Consistency is relatively trivial in RDDs because the data underneath it is assumed to be immutable. If, however, the data was changing, then consistency would be a problem here. Distributor-shared memory doesn't make any assumptions about mutability and, therefore, leaves the consistency semantics to the application to take care of.
At last let's look at the benefits of Spark:
Spark provides full recovery using lineage.
Spark is optimized in making computations as well as placing the computations optimally using the directory cyclic graph.
Very easy programming paradigms using the transformation and actions on RDDs as well as a ready-rich library support for machine learning, graphics and recently data frames.
At this point a question comes up. If Spark is so great, does Spark actually replace Hadoop? The answer is clearly no because Spark provides an application framework for you to write your big data applications. However, it still needs to run on a storage system or on a no-SQL system.
Spark is never limited to smaller dataset and its not always about in-memorycomputation. Spark has very good number higher APIS . Spark can process the in GB as well. In my realtime experience i have used Spark to handle the streaming application where we usually gets the data in GB/Hour basic . And we have used Spark in Telecommunication to handle bigger dataset as well . Check this RDD Persistence how to accommodate bigger datasets.
In case of real world problem we can't solve them just by one MapReduce program which is having a Mapper class and a reducer class, We mostly need to build a pipeline. A pipeline will consists of multiple stages each having MapReduce program , and out put of one stage will be fed to one or multiple times to the subsequent stages. And this is a pain because of the amount of IO it involves.
In case of MapReduce there are these Map and Reduce tasks subsequent to which there is a synchronization barrier and one needs to preserve the data to the disc. This feature of MapReduce framework was developed with the intent that in case of failure the jobs can be recovered but the drawback to this is that, it does not leverage the memory of the Hadoop cluster to the maximum. And this becomes worse when you have a iterative algorithm in your pipeline. Every iteration will cause significant amount of Disk IO.
So in order to solve the problem , Spark introduced a new Data Structure called RDD . A DS that can hold the information like how the data can be read from the disk and what to compute. Spark also provided easy programming paradigm to create pipeline(DAG) by transforming RDDs . And what you get it a series of RDD which knows how to get the data and what to compute.
Finally when an Action is invoked Spark framework internally optimize the pipeline , group together the portion that can be executed together(map phases), and create a final optimized execution plan from the logical pipeline. And then executes it. It also provides user the flexibility to select the data user wanted to be cached. Hence spark is able to achieve near about 10 to 100 times faster batch processing than MapReduce.
Spark advantages over hadoop.
As spark tasks across stages can be executed on same executor nodes, the time to spawn the Executor is saved for multiple task.
Even if you have huge memory, MapReduce can never make any advantage of caching data in memory and using the in memory data for subsequent steps.
Spark on other hand can cache data if huge JVM is available to it. Across stages the inmemory data is used.
In Spark task run as threads on same executor, making the task memory footprint light.
In MapReduce the Map of reduce Task are processes and not threads.
Spark uses efficient serialization format to store data on disk.
Follow this for detail understanding http://bytepadding.com/big-data/spark/understanding-spark-through-map-reduce/

what are the disadvantages of mapreduce?

What are the disadvantages of mapreduce? There are lots of advantages of mapreduce. But I would like to know the disadvantages of mapreduce too.
I would rather ask when mapreduce is not a suitable choice? I don't think you would see any disadvantage if you are using it as intended. Having said that, there are certain cases where mapreduce is not a suitable choice :
Real-time processing.
It's not always very easy to implement each and everything as a MR program.
When your intermediate processes need to talk to each other(jobs run in isolation).
When your processing requires lot of data to be shuffled over the network.
When you need to handle streaming data. MR is best suited to batch process huge amounts of data which you already have with you.
When you can get the desired result with a standalone system. It's obviously less painful to configure and manage a standalone system as compared to a distributed system.
When you have OLTP needs. MR is not suitable for a large number of short on-line transactions.
There might be several other cases. But the important thing here is how well are you using it. For example, you can't expect a MR job to give you the result in a couple of ms. You can't count it as its disadvantage either. It's just that you are using it at the wrong place. And it holds true for any technology, IMHO. Long story short, think well before you act.
If you still want, you can take the above points as the disadvantages of mapreduce :)
HTH
Here are some usecases where MapReduce does not work very well.
When you need a response fast. e.g. say < few seconds (Use stream
processing, CEP etc instead)
Processing graphs
Complex algorithms e.g. some machine learning algorithms like SVM, and also see 13 drawfs
(The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View From Berkeley)
Iterations - when you need to process data again and again. e.g. KMeans - use Spark
When map phase generate too many keys. Thensorting takes for ever.
Joining two large data sets with complex conditions (equal case can
be handled via hashing etc)
Stateful operations - e.g. evaluate a state machine Cascading tasks
one after the other - using Hive, Big might help, but lot of overhead
rereading and parsing data.
You need to rethink/ rewrite trivial operations like Joins, Filter to achieve in map/reduce/Key/value patterns
MapReduce assumes that the job can be parallelized. But it may not be the case for all data processing jobs.
It is closely tied with Java, of course you have Pig and Hive for rescue but you lose flexibility.
First of all, it streams the map output, if it is possible to keep it in memory this will be more efficient. I originally deployed my algorithm using MPI but when I scaled up some nodes started swapping, that's why I made the transition.
The Namenode keeps track of the metadata of all files in your distributed file system. I am reading a hadoop book (Hadoop in action) and it mentioned that Yahoo estimated the metadata to be approximately 600 bytes per file. This implies if you have too many files your Namenode could experience problems.
If you do not want to use the streaming API you have to write your program in the java language. I for example did a translation from C++. This has some side effects, for example Java has a large string overhead compared to C. Since my software is all about strings this is some sort of drawback.
To be honest I really had to think hard to find disadvantages. The problems mapreduce solved for me were way bigger than the problems it introduced. This list is definitely not complete, just a few first remarks. Obviously you have to keep in mind that it is geared towards Big Data, and that's where it will perform at its best. There are plenty of other distribution frameworks out there with their own characteristics.

hadoop map reduce vs clojure pmap function

Supposedly i have large independent sets of data in seperate excel files.
In terms of runtime efficiency, would it be better to use clojure Pmap function to process the data or hadoop map reduce?
Each excel file consists of about 34000 rows at least and i have quite a large number of them.
Sorry for the beginner question as i am relatively new to both and are doing research on them
As some of you guys have explained,
Perhaps one more question would be to compare clojure pmap against instance of running multi instances of the same copies of software, what are the differences between those?
The only thing i can think of is that pmap can take any amount of variables however, reading one file per instance of applications would require the number of files to be known upfront and the instances be initialized
I'd say use Hadoop, but not directly, but rather through Cascalog from Clojure. The value proposition here is all that Hadoop gives you plus the great declarative query language (which may well make using Cascalog worthwhile even if the task is relatively small; setup with Hadoop in local mode is completely hassle-free).
The original introductory blog posts are still the best starting point (although there's great documentation available now -- see the wiki at GitHub): the first one is here and it links to the second one at the end.
To give you a taste of what it looks like, here's a snippet from the first tutorial (finding all "follow" relationships where the follower is older than the person they follow):
(?<- (stdout) [?person1 ?person2]
(age ?person1 ?age1)
(follows ?person1 ?person2)
(age ?person2 ?age2)
(< ?age2 ?age1))
No problem running this on a cluster too, see News Feed in 38 lines of code using Cascalog on Nathan Marz's blog for an example.
I wouldn't go running and establishing an Hadoop cluster just to be able to process a lot of small files (which is not ideal for Hadoop anyway). Hadoop is geared towards handling large files (its block size is 64M) and the map reduce efficiency comes from letting having these large files distributed over the cluster and sending the computation to the data.
In your case it seems that running multiple copies of your software each processing one file at a time would solve the problem and would have the least overhead - both computational and operational (ie. setting up and maintaining hadoop).
One thing that hadoop can give you is the management of the processing task, that is retires in case of failure etc., but again, it seems and overkill for what you describe
Lots of languages have map reduce capabilities, including Clojure.
I'd say that Hadoop would be the hands-down winner because it manages it over clusters of machines. It's the potential for massive parallelization that would give it the clear edge over anything else that didn't have it built in.

cassandra and hadoop - realtime vs batch

As per http://www.dbta.com/Articles/Columns/Notes-on-NoSQL/Cassandra-and-Hadoop---Strange-Bedfellows-or-a-Match-Made-in-Heaven-75890.aspx
Cassandra has pursued somewhat different solutions than has Hadoop. Cassandra excels at high-volume real-time transaction processing, while Hadoop excels at more batch-oriented analytical solutions.
What are the differences in the architecture/implementation of Cassandra and Hadoop which account for this sort of difference in usage. (in lay software professional terms)
I wanted to add, because I think there might be a misleading statement here saying Cassandra might perform good for reads.
Cassandra is not very good at random reads either, it's good compared to other solutions out there in how can you read randomly over a huge amount of data, but at some point if the reads are truly random you can't avoid hitting the disk every single time which is expensive, and it may come down to something useless like a few thousand hits/second depending on your cluster, so planning on doing lots of random queries might not be the best, you'll run into a wall if you start thinking like that. I'd say everything in big data works better when you do sequential reads or find a way to sequentially store them. Most cases even when you do real time processing you still want to find a way to batch your queries.
This is why you need to think beforehand what you store under a key and try to get the most information possible out of a read.
It's also kind of funny that statement says transaction and Cassandra in the same sentence, cause that really doesn't happen.
On the other hand hadoop is meant to be batch almost by definition, but hadoop is a distributed map reduce framework, not a db, in fact, I've seen and used lots of hadoop over cassandra, they're not antagonistic technologies.
Handling your big data in real time is doable but requires good thinking and care about when and how you hit the database.
Edit: Removed secondary indices example, as last time I checked that used random reads (though I've been away from Cassandra for more than a year now).
The Vanilla hadoop consists of a Distributed File System (DFS) at the core and libraries to support Map Reduce model to write programs to do analysis. DFS is what enables Hadoop to be scalable. It takes care of chunking data into multiple nodes in a multi node cluster so that Map Reduce can work on individual chunks of data available nodes thus enabling parallelism.
The paper for Google File System which was the basis for Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) can be found here
The paper for Map Reduce model can be found here
For a detailed explanation on Map Reduce read this post
Cassandra is a highly scalable, eventually consistent, distributed, structured key-value store. It is not a conventional database but is more like Hashtable or HashMap which stores a key/value pair. Cassandra works on top of HDFS and makes use of it to scale. Both Cassandra and HBase are implementations of Google's BigTable. Paper for Google BigTable can be found here.
BigTable makes use of a String Sorted Table (SSTable) to store key/value pairs. SSTable is just a File in HDFS which stores key followed by value. Furthermore BigTable maintains a index which has key and offset in the File for that key which enables reading of value for that key using only a seek to the offset location. SSTable is effectively immutable which means after creating the File there is no modifications can be done to existing key/value pairs. New key/value pairs are appended to the file. Update and Delete of records are appended to the file, update with a newer key/value and deletion with a key and tombstone value. Duplicate keys are allowed in this file for SSTable. The index is also modified with whenever update or delete take place so that offset for that key points to the latest value or tombstone value.
Thus you can see Cassandra's internal allow fast read/write which is crucial for real time data handling. Whereas Vanilla Hadoop with Map Reduce can be used to process batch oriented passive data.
Hadoop consists of two fundamental components: distributed datastore (HDFS) and distributed computation framework (MapReduce). It reads a bunch of input data then writes output from/to the datastore. It needs distributed datastore since it performs parallel computing with the local data on cluster of machines to minimize the data loading time.
While Cassandra is the datastore with linear scalability and fault-tolerance ability. It lacks of the parallel computation ability provided by MapReduce in Hadoop.
The default datastore (HDFS) of Hadoop can be replaced with other storage backend, such as Cassandra, Glusterfs, Ceph, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure's file system, MapR’s FS, and etc. However, each alternatives has its pros and cons, they should be evaluated based on the needs.
There are some resources that help you integrate Hadoop with Cassandra: http://docs.datastax.com/en/cassandra/3.0/cassandra/configuration/configHadoop.html

what does " local caching of data" mean in the context of this article?

From the following paragraphs of Text——
(http://developer.yahoo.com/hadoop/tutorial/module2.html),It mentions that sequential readable large files are not suitable for local caching. but I don't understand what does local here mean...
There are two assumptions in my opinion: one is Client caches data from HDFS and the other is datanode caches hdfs data in its local filesystem or Memory for Clients to access quickly. is there anyone who can explain more? Thanks a lot.
But while HDFS is very scalable, its high performance design also restricts it to a
particular class of applications; it is not as general-purpose as NFS. There are a large
number of additional decisions and trade-offs that were made with HDFS. In particular:
Applications that use HDFS are assumed to perform long sequential streaming reads from
files. HDFS is optimized to provide streaming read performance; this comes at the expense of
random seek times to arbitrary positions in files.
Data will be written to the HDFS once and then read several times; updates to files
after they have already been closed are not supported. (An extension to Hadoop will provide
support for appending new data to the ends of files; it is scheduled to be included in
Hadoop 0.19 but is not available yet.)
Due to the large size of files, and the sequential nature of reads, the system does
not provide a mechanism for local caching of data. The overhead of caching is great enough
that data should simply be re-read from HDFS source.
Individual machines are assumed to fail on a frequent basis, both permanently and
intermittently. The cluster must be able to withstand the complete failure of several
machines, possibly many happening at the same time (e.g., if a rack fails all together).
While performance may degrade proportional to the number of machines lost, the system as a
whole should not become overly slow, nor should information be lost. Data replication
strategies combat this problem.
Any real Mapreduce job is probably going to process GB's (10/100/1000s) of data from HDFS.
Therefore any one mapper instance is most probably going to be processing a fair amount of data (typical block size is 64/128/256 MB depending on your configuration) in a sequential nature (it will read the file / block in its entirety from start to end.
It is also unlikely that another mapper instance running on the same machine will want to process that data block again any time in the immediate future, more so that multiple mapper instances will also be processing data alongside this mapper in any one TaskTracker (hopefully with a fair few being 'local' to actually physical location of the data, i.e. a replica of the data block also exists on the same machine the mapper instance is running).
With all this in mind, caching the data read from HDFS is probably not going to gain you much - you'll most probably not get a cache hit on that data before another block is queried and will ultimately replace it in the cache.

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