Mixture of Hadoop and RDBMS Creates Need for Infrastructure Solutions to Tie Together Pieces of Data

Despite the initial hype about open source Apache Hadoop software overtaking the enterprise, that has not turned out to be the case. Relational Database Management Systems are holding their own and Hadoop systems work alongside these stalwarts according to the recent article, "Hadoop Growing, Not Replacing RDBMS in Enterprises."

Ventana Research, a business and IT advisory firm in San Ramon, California, surveyed more than 160 companies and found that these enterprise organizations have been putting Hadoop to store and analyze petabytes of data that RDMS cannot handle.

According to the article,

Ventana's research shows that a majority of companies that are using Hadoop are using it mainly to collect and analyze huge volumes of unstructured and machine-generated information, such as log and event data, search engine results, and text and multimedia content from social media sites. The technology is much less likelyo be used for analyzing conventional structured data such as transaction data, customer information and call records, where traditional RDBMS tools still appear to have an edge, [author of the report David] Menninger said.

While the article opines that the biggest challenge is the lack of people who are skilled to work with Hadoop, we see a gaping hole that needs to be filled with an infrastructure solution. This will tie together multiple technologies allowing for a single point of access of information.

Megan Feil, July 31, 2012