I am often asked what is a new technology I should get into, so I figured I would give a rundown of a new technology that many people have not heard of yet. If you are looking to get into the technology field, you might want to look into Apache Hadoop. It is fairly new and is starting to spread and be used by major companies like Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. Those are definitely companies that are innovative industry leaders in technologies to be used in large enterprise environments.

The History of Hadoop

The basic technology was actually invented by Google back in their earlier days so they could usefully index all the rich textural and structural information they were collecting, and then present meaningful and actionable results to the users. Based off this open source project Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting around 2007. Doug named the technology after his son’s toy elephant, Hadoop. Since 2008, Yahoo has played a major part in developing Hadoop for enterprise applications.

What is Hadoop?

It is an open-source framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications. It was designed to solve problems where you have a lot of data that does not fit nicely into tables. Hadoop is a top-level Apache project being built and used by a global community of contributorswritten in the Java programming language. You would want to use Hadoop for times when you want to run analytics that are deep and computationally extensive, like clustering or targeting. It enables distributed parallel processing of huge amounts of data across inexpensive, commodity servers. No data is too big for Hadoop.

Where will you see Hadoop?

Hadoop is applicable to almost every industry and you are probably using it on a daily basis for things like finding the best hotel online, getting directions to that hotel you just booked, or connecting with a coworker through sites like LinkedIn. Finance companies can use it to do risk analysis and portfolio evaluations and online retail stores will use it to help the customer search for items they actually want to buy. Major companies that are using Hadoop include:

• Facebook
• Yahoo
• Amazon
• LinkedIn
• Apple
• Ebay
• Netflix
• Microsoft
• Twitter