What's the easiest way to explain What is Hadoop and Map/Reduce?

Question

It's very easy to explain NoSQL from high level view - it is basically "key-value" storage. Of course with thousand minor and important things, but in general it's just key value storage.

What's the best way to explain Hadoop and Map/Reduce? May be some "real world" example which can be easy to give an compare for even newbies? Thanks!

Answer 1

I recently found this great article describing Map Reduce :

I’ve been planning on writing about the Google’s MapReduce algorithm for some time but I couldn’t find a good practical example. Then we had a Northwest C++ Users Group presentation by Steve Yegge and a followup discussion and beers, and I had a little epiphany. Steve was talking about, among other things, the build process. And that’s just a bunch of algorithms that are perfect for explaining MapReduce.

The code examples are in C++, but the content is really language agnostic.

Answer 2

Here's a great tutorial on map/reduce in general, explaining the background, basics and data flow. I'm finding it useful to explain Google's App Engine implementation as well.

http://developer.yahoo.com/hadoop/tutorial/module4.html