What Big Data Tool is for what Purpose? Hadoop Tools

Apache Hadoop is an excellent framework for processing, storing and analyzing large volumes of unstructured data – aka Big Data. But getting a handle on all the project’s myriad components and sub-components, with names like Pig and Mahout, can be a difficult.

Pig: Pig Latin is a Hadoop-based language developed by Yahoo. It is relatively easy to learn and is adept at very deep, very long data pipelines (a limitation of SQL.)

HBase: HBase is a non-relational database that allows for low-latency, quick lookups in Hadoop. It adds transactional capabilities to Hadoop, allowing users to conduct updates, inserts and deletes. EBay and Facebook use HBase heavily.

Flume: Flume is a framework for populating Hadoop with data. Agents are populated throughout ones IT infrastructure – inside web servers, application servers and mobile devices, for example – to collect data and integrate it into Hadoop.

Oozie: Oozie is a workflow processing system that lets users define a series of jobs written in multiple languages – such as Map Reduce, Pig and Hive — then intelligently link them to one another. Oozie allows users to specify, for example, that a particular query is only to be initiated after specified previous jobs on which it relies for data are completed.

Flume: Flume is a framework for populating Hadoop with data. Agents are populated throughout ones IT infrastructure – inside web servers, application servers and mobile devices, for example – to collect data and integrate it into Hadoop.

Ambari: Ambari is a web-based set of tools for deploying, administering and monitoring Apache Hadoop clusters. It’s development is being led by engineers from Hortonworoks, which include Ambari in its Hortonworks Data Platform.

Avro: Avro is a data serialization system that allows for encoding the schema of Hadoop files. It is adept at parsing data and performing removed procedure calls.

Mahout: Mahout is a data mining library. It takes the most popular data mining algorithms for performing clustering, regression testing and statistical modeling and implements them using the Map Reduce model.

Sqoop: Sqoop is a connectivity tool for moving data from non-Hadoop data stores – such as relational databases and data warehouses – into Hadoop. It allows users to specify the target location inside of Hadoop and instruct Sqoop to move data from Oracle, Teradata or other relational databases to the target.

HCatalog: HCatalog is a centralized metadata management and sharing service for Apache Hadoop. It allows for a unified view of all data in Hadoop clusters and allows diverse tools, including Pig and Hive, to process any data elements without needing to know physically where in the cluster the data is stored.

BigTop: BigTop is an effort to create a more formal process or framework for packaging and interoperability testing of Hadoop’s sub-projects and related components with the goal improving the Hadoop platform as a whole.