Adventures in Tech

For people interested in developing Hadoop analytic applications there is a plethora of options. The options range from writing low-level, hand-tuned Java map-reduce code, to using a higher level language to manipulate the data such as Pig and Hive. There are pros and cons for each option. For the first, the code becomes complex for anything other than the canonical word-count example, and for the latter, to do anything meaningful, you almost always end up augmenting the higher level language with user-defined functions written in a different language to regain power and flexibility, causing maintenance nightmares. A happy medium in between is to use one of the data-flow libraries for Hadoop, of which Cascading is one. Since Cascading has been around for some time, the online documentation is relatively mature, and includes a gentle introduction to the library, with example source code, and a well written user's guide. However this does not obviate the need for a book that desc...