How Hadoop Differs from Big Data

Notwithstanding the close relationship which big data shares with Hadoop, there exists a fundamental difference which separates the former from the latter. While big data refers to an asset, which is often ambiguous and complex by nature, Hadoop is a program which is used to manage big data.

Big data involves large chunks of data put together by businesses or other parties to work with specific operations to meet particular goals. Generally, it includes different forms of data to meet specific objectives. This data can be in different formats. Some common examples include the data pertaining to the purchases in currency formats, the data associated with the customer identifiers such as product information or social security numbers, sales numbers, inventory numbers and so on. These or any other greater mass of information is called big data.

Normally, big data is considered as the raw form of data until it is sorted out by means of different kinds of handlers and tools.

Hadoop is custom-made to handle this kind of data. It works in collaboration with other software products to interpret the results of big data searches by virtue of generic algorithms and methods. The open source program involves primary components such as MapReduce and Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS).

One of the primary functions of Hadoop is to scale down the size of the data using Mapreduce. At first, it helps map a large set of data and then perform a reduction on the content so it can be tailored it to achieve specific results. Here the reduce function filters the raw data to help the HDFS system to distribute data across a network or migrate it depending on the necessity of a user.

Professionals such as developers, database administrators and other professionals related to the technology use the various features of Hadoop to manage big data in a variety of ways. For instance, Hadoop is used in various data strategies like targeting with non-uniform data, clustering and data that neither fits neatly into a traditional table nor replies to simple queries.