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Hadoop Digest, August 2010

The biggest announcement of the year: Apache Hadoop 0.21.0 released and is available for download here. Over 1300 issues have been addressed since 0.20.2; you can find details for Common, HDFS and MapReduce. Note from Tom White who did an excellent job as a release manager: “Please note that this release has not undergone testing at scale and should not be considered stable or suitable for production. It is being classified as a minor release, which means that it should be API compatible with 0.20.2.”. Please find a detailed description of what’s new in 0.21.0 release here.

Community trends & news:

  • New branch hadoop-0.20-security is being created. Apart from the security features, which are in high demand, it will include improvements and fixes from over 12 months of work by Yahoo!. The new security features are going to be a very valuable and welcome contribution (also discussed before).
  • A thorough discussion about approaches of backing up HDFS data in this thread.
  • Hive voted to become Top Level Apache Project (TLP) (also here).  Note that we’ll keep Hive under Search-Hadoop.com even after Hive goes TLP.
  • Pig voted to become TLP too (also here).  Note that we’ll keep Pig under Search-Hadoop.com even after Pig goes TLP.
  • Tip: if you define a Hadoop object (e.g. Partitioner, as implementing Configurable, then its setConf() method will be called once, right after it gets instantiated)
  • For those new to ZooKeeper and pressed for time, here you can find the shortest ZooKeeper description — only 4 sentences short!
  • Good read “Avoiding Common Hadoop Administration Issues” article.

Notable efforts:

  • Howl: Common metadata layer for Hadoop’s Map Reduce, Pig, and Hive (yet another contribution from Yahoo!)
  • PHP library for Avro, includes schema parsing, Avro data file and
    string IO.
  • avro-scala-compiler-plugin: aimed to auto-generate Avro serializable classes based on some simple case class definitions

FAQ:

  • How to programatically determine the names of the files in a particular Hadoop/HDFS directory?
    Use FileSystem & FileStatus API. Detailed examples are in this thread.
  • How to restrict HDFS space usage?
    Please, refer to HDFS Quotas Guide.
  • How to pass parameters determined at run-time (i.e. not hard-coded) to Hadoop objects (like Partitioner, Writable, etc.)?
    One option is to define a Hadoop object as implementing Configurable. In this case its setConf() method will be called once, right after it gets instantiated and you can use “native” Hadoop configuration for passing parameters you need.

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