Other interesting projects

Whether you use a bundled distribution or stick with the base Apache Hadoop download, you will encounter many references to other related projects. We've covered several of these such as Hive, Samza, and Crunch in this book; we'll now highlight some of the others.

Note that this coverage seeks to point out the highlights (from the authors' perspective) as well as give a taste of the breadth of types of projects available. As mentioned earlier, keep looking out, as there will be new ones launching all the time.

HBase

Perhaps the most popular Apache Hadoop-related project that we didn't cover in this book is HBase (http://hbase.apache.org). Based on the BigTable model of data storage publicized by Google in an academic paper (sound familiar?), HBase is a nonrelational data store sitting atop HDFS.

While both MapReduce and Hive focus on batch-like data access patterns, HBase instead seeks to provide very low-latency access to data. Consequently HBase can, unlike the aforementioned...