What is Hadoop?
Hadoop is a free, Java-based programming framework that supports the processing of large data sets in a distributed computing environment. It is part of the Apache project sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop makes it possible to run applications on systems with thousands of nodes involving thousands of terabyte s. Its distributed file system facilitates rapid data transfer rate s among nodes and allows the system to continue operating uninterrupted in case of a node failure. This approach lowers the risk of catastrophic system failure, even if a significant number of nodes become inoperative. Hadoop was inspired by Google 's MapReduce , a software framework in which an application is broken down into numerous small parts. Any of these parts (also called fragments or blocks) can be run on any node in the cluster . Doug Cutting, Hadoop's creator, named the framework after his child's stuffed toy elephant. T...