Hadoop discussions at Microsoft Research

I was invited to present a talk about Hadoop File System Architecture at Microsoft Research at Seattle. This is a research group and is focussed on long-term research, so it is no surprise that they are interested in knowing how a growing company like Facebook is using Hadoop to its advantage.

I met a few folks who chatted with me about how Microsoft SQL Server is being modified to handle large scala databases. These folks heartily agreed with a comment I made in my presentation that Dr. Dewitt and Dr. Stonebraker is missing the point when they are comparing performance numbers between Hadoop with traditional Database systems.... rather than comparing the scalability and fault-tolerance of these systems. I had learned some of the fundamentals of Database systems from Professor Dewitt during my graduate studies at Uiversity of Wisconsin Madison, but Dr Dewitt is a Microsoft employee now!

The fact that Facebook uses the SQL interface of Hive layered over Hadoop makes it even more interesting to Microsoft. They wanted to know the performance difference between Hive and PIG and would like to compare them to their distributed-SQL-Server software.

Here are the slides I used for my presentation.

I presented a set of slides that describes the Hadoop development at Facebook at the HadoopWorld conference in New York today. It was well received by more than 100 people. I have presented at many-a-conferences in the west coast but this is the first time I have presented at a conference in New York... there are more hadoop users here versus mostly hadoop developers in the west coast. There were plenty of questions, especially about Hadoop-Archive and Realtime-Hadoop. There were people asking me questions about HDFS Symbolic links and HDFS-scribe copier.

Earlier, I visited the university of Notre Dame to conduct a department seminar and present a guest lecture for the graduate students at the Department of Computer Science. There is plenty of interesting research being led by Prof Douglas Thain. One interesting research idea that came up was to place HDFS block replicas by analyzing HDFS access patterns. It is possible that we can provide HDFS datanode/namenode logs to researchers who can analyze these logs to come up with better algorithms for HDFS block replica placement.