The Apache Hadoop project has brought forth its 1.0.0 release after what is now six years of gestation and community-driven development. As a software framework designed to support big data in compute-intensive environments, Hadoop has garnered particularly high levels of interest in recent months and spawned a litany of dedicated subprojects.
Given Hadoop's increasing popularity and scope, its development team appears to have spent considerable time and effort providing both substance as well as higher-level gloss and shine for this milestone release. Key to the 1.0.0 version update is the HBase database, which is an open-source, distributed, versioned, column-oriented store modeled after Google's Bigtable.
HBase has been afforded top priority in this release (with the intention of it now acting as a fully fledged alternative to MySQL) and it sports "sync and flush" support for transaction logging — it is essentially designed to act as a store for very large relational databases inside Hadoop itself.
Hadoop enables data-intensive distributed applications to work with thousands of nodes and exabytes of data by connecting thousands of servers to process and analyze data at supercomputing speed. Its focus concentrates on the need to cost-effectively store, process, manage, and analyze the growing volumes of data being created and collected every day.
Quoted on the Apache Software Foundation official blog this week, Gartner VP Merv Adrian said that his firm has seen a "steady increase" in interest in Apache Hadoop and related "big data" technologies "as measured by substantial growth in client inquiries, dramatic rises in attendance at industry events, increasing financial investments, and the introduction of products from leading data management and data integration software vendors."
The 1.0 release of Apache Hadoop also supports the following:
- Security (strong authentication via Kerberos)
- Webhdfs (RESTful API to HDFS)
- Performance-enhanced access to local files for HBase
- Other performance enhancements, bug fixes, and features
- All version 0.20.205 and prior 0.20.2xx features
