

Hadoop vs. an RDBMS: How much (less) would you pay? - abennett
http://www.itworld.com/data-centerservers/238091/road-hadoop-part-2-how-much-less-would-you-pay

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andrewmccall
For raw storage Hadoop beats an RDBMS, sure I'll buy that argument. It's not
the same thing though and it doesn't do the same job.

Hadoop excels at data processing, trawling vast quantities of unstructured or
semi structured data and extracting information from it. It's a poor platform
for random access to specific elements of that data though.

RDBMS are great in exactly the places Hadoop isn't, getting access to random
elements of data in a structured manner. Executing structured queries on that
data. Things you know you'll do a lot of and can optimise.

There are column and table data stores built on top of Hadoop, and it can be
argued that they could be used as an alternative to an RDBMS but they aren't
drop in replacements and for the most part they're not meant to do the same
job.

The most interesting uses of Hadoop aren't going to come from replacing
existing RDBMS infrastructure with a Hadoop cluster. They're going to come
from pushing data into a Hadoop cluster to process it. Collecting data that
would otherwise be impossible to collect because it's either unstructured or
there is simply too much to put in a RDBMS at a cost effective scale.

Hadoop and the NoSQL movement is exciting when you start to think about
processing that data and pulling what's useful back out into your existing
infrastructure.

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BrianLy
Is Hadoop really approachable for most businesses who don't have a some sort
of large-scale need for analytics?

Last time I looked there were things like Pig (<http://pig.apache.org/>) but
the use case was "big data". Many businesses use RDBMs exclusively and can
easily use analytics tools like Business Objects. Companies may be dealing
with what they consider to be a lot of data but it pales in comparison to what
many web startups are dealing with.

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nathanwdavis
This article seems to misinterpret scale-up vs. scale-out.

>Yahoo and Facebook are excellent examples of how Hadoop can scale up; but
little is usually said about how Hadoop can scale the other way..

It says this right after mentioning that those operations have 5-digit sized
hadoop clusters.

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lmm
Sure, Hadoop is cheaper than Oracle, but the article seems to completely
ignore that mysql and postgres exist.

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zapman449
Well, Oracle is more prevalent in big enterprise. But if you look at the
equations at the end of the article, a mysql/postgres DBA costs probably
80-90% of the Oracle DBA. The licensing costs are less, but the hardware cost
for the big-iron and big-SAN to run the RDBMS is pretty much the same.

