Posted by Gwen Shapira on Sep 1, 2011
We don’t pay enough attention to Hadoop.
By “we” I mean DBAs, the rest of the world is paying plenty of attention to Hadoop. Recently, I started asking my customers and fellow DBAs about Hadoop adoption in their company. Turns out that many of them have Hadoop. Hadoop shows up in large companies and small ones, in established industries and in startups. Its everywhere.
The way Hadoop shows up in all companies, and the way DBAs don’t pay Hadoop much attention, reminds me a lot of how MySQL started showing up in the enterprise. It didn’t start by DBAs showing up one morning and telling their managers:
“There’s this new open source database. Its not as stable as Oracle and it doesn’t have all the features we need, but man – its going to save us tons of money, and its pretty simple to manage.”
Nope, this never happened. What happened instead is that developers learned about MySQL, and it seemed to them like an excellent way to go around this whole DBA thing. They could install it themselves, learn how to use it in a week and become happy and productive. Without ever having to discuss their schema, data model, requirements, capacity planning, availability, backups and all the other things that DBAs want to talk about.
By the time the application came out of developement and had to be deployed in production, MySQL was a done deal. No one is going to re-write the app just because the DBAs don’t know MySQL. Sometimes the Oracle DBAs were forced to learn and admin MySQL, but more often it was considered “not a database” and left for the sysadmins to manage, while the DBAs continued to pretend that the entire world is written by Oracle.
So thats what Hadoop adoption looks like now – Its usually introduced by the developers and administered by sysadmins, while DBAs continue to pretend it doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. When pressed, some DBAs will even insist that all this “big data” thing can and should be done in a database, but the developers are too ignorant or lazy to work with a proper RDBMS.
I think the day arrived when, just like DBAs can no longer ignore MySQL, we can no longer ignore Hadoop either. So lets talk about it.
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