Improving the Big Data Toolkit - NYTimes.com

Excerpt from a Steve Lohr Hadoop market snapshot

"Hadoop 2.0, said Merv Adrian, an analyst at Gartner, is “an important step,” making the technology “a far more versatile data operating environment.” The new version of Hadoop, he said, can handle larger data sets faster than its predecessor and it opens the door to analyzing data in real-time streams. So far, Hadoop has been used mostly to divvy up huge sets of data for analysis, but only in batches, not streams. The new Hadoop has also been tweaked to work more easily with traditional database tools, like SQL.
Hadoop 2.0, Mr. Adrian said, was built to include “requirements for the commercial mainstream.” Historically, Hadoop’s most avid users were Internet companies like Yahoo, Facebook and Amazon."

Improving the Big Data Toolkit - NYTimes.com