Hadoop

The era of big data is here. But better search tools can make it more useful for organizations and less risky for the rest of us.

Hadoop training courses and certification programs are available from companies including Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM and MapR. But if you're not ready to commit to formal training courses, there are also free resources that can get a newcomer started on Hadoop or broaden a veteran's skills.

Enterprises are adopting Hadoop faster than they can hire IT talent to build and maintain these distributed computing deployments. To fill the gap, many are turning to partners that can offer a mix of Hadoop consulting, software development and training services.

With the Hadoop Summit taking place this week in San Jose, California, vendors supporting the open-source data-analysis platform are rushing new products to market.

Finding developers with the skills to create MapReduce jobs in Apache Hadoop is challenging, but you can ease that hiring pain with Cascading, an open source Java application framework for building enterprise Big Data applications on Hadoop.

Big data is all about storing and accessing large amounts of structured and unstructured data. However, where to put that data and how to access it have become the biggest challenges for enterprises looking to leverage the information. If you haven't yet considererd the open source Hadoop platform, now's the time.

Growing enterprise interest in Big Data analytics is beginning to drive partnerships between vendors of traditional relational database management technologies and purveyors of Apache Hadoop.

Companies from IBM to Amazon are turning to Hadoop to manage the surge in data that needs storing.

Online database repository provider RainStor unveiled what it is calling the industry's first enterprise-class database that runs natively on Hadoop.

Making good on an announcement made earlier this year, Microsoft has installed a version of Apache Hadoop on its Azure cloud service. The company now offers a limited preview version of the open-source data analysis platform, often used for big data-style analysis.

Despite some lingering technology issues, Hadoop is ready for enterprise use, IT executives said Tuesday at the Hadoop World conference here.