“Hadoop is enabled by a technology Google created called MapReduce, a way to process and generate large data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster. Google wrote a few papers on it, and then it got picked up by Yahoo programmers who brought it into the open source Apache environment. MapReduce evolved into what Yahoo hoped would be an answer to its search engine woes: an open source platform called Hadoop that collects data from sources such as social media, customers, and financials, storing it in a data warehouse to undergo the MapReduce process. It has made it easier and cheaper than ever to analyze the data being churned out by the Internet. Fun database fact—Hadoop was named after a toy elephant.”
