January 2020

Sponsored by Teradata

Since its initial rise in 2008, Hadoop and its yellow elephant logo have become ubiquitous in the data world and are largely synonymous with the concept and implementation of big data. Both terms—Hadoop and big data—have been so used and abused in marketing by vendors and consultants alike that their real meanings have been confused and obscured.

In the past year or two, Hadoop has fallen somewhat out of favor, experiencing a set of midlife crises: of identity, confidence, deployment, cloudiness, and data governance. This series of five ThoughtPoints, published from October 2019 to January 2020, explores Hadoop’s strengths and weaknesses, and what we should do about them as we enter a new decade when analytics has become a central aspect of digital transformation.

We conclude that Hadoop is not yet dead, but that in significant aspects of its current use, enterprises would be well advised to revisit relational technology as a foundation for improved data and systems management, and as a single access point for analytics distributed among multiple technologies and across a hybrid on-premises and cloud delivery environment. Teradata VantageTM with Advanced SQL is offered as a sound foundation for such an approach.

Download omnibus 5-article pdf.