What Is The MapReduce Framework Used For?

By Greg Black

The MapReduce programming framework was first developed by Google to be an extremely efficient way to deal with massive amounts of data. In many companies, data needs to be accessed very quickly, and this framework was originally designed to be able to deal with data that was even spread across thousands of individual machines.

The data processing doesn't have to take place on such a huge scale, though. Individuals and smaller companies can use this framework to organize their data and discover some very important relationships within the data set. MapReduce functionality can help you quickly analyze all your data, no matter how much you are dealing with.

It doesn't matter if you are working with a large or small data set, you can use different MapReduce applications to query the system and receive the information you can actually work with. Many companies use MapReduce for fraud detections, graph analysis, exploring sharing and searching behavior of the customers, and monitoring data transfers. These activities were traditionally hard to discover, especially in data sets that continued to grow.

When you submit a MapReduce job it will be split up into more manageable jobs that can be processed when it is assigned by the map task. It will work in a completely parallel manner to accomplish this. The program will then output the maps into a reduce task, which, in the long run, will help you use all the resources of a large, distributed system.

When the system has split up the information and it has been reduced, users can employ MapReduce functionality to handle the rest of the process. This includes the scheduling, the monitoring, and any necessary re-executions of failed tasks. When these tasks can be automated, it will lighten the burden of your data mining activities.

One option is to use the Hadoop API to interact with MapReduce functionality. You need to make sure that all data transfers and job configurations are correct and consistent in order to maintain the integrity of the data base. The API is the way that many companies are developing new and reliable methods to discover important facts in their data.

When you use the Apache Hadoop API, you can submit and configure a job to the job scheduler which will then distribute the tasks to the worker nodes or systems within the cluster. The master system (job scheduler) will then schedule and monitor the necessary tasks and even provide status and diagnostic information as you go.

By using the functionality built into MapReduce applications, you will be able to effectively process your data, even if it is set up on thousands of different machines. You might consider this as an option if you are looking for a way to track customer behavior or just to transfer data from one system to another. - 32198

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