MapReduce overview

MapReduce is a programming model for large-scale distributed data processing. It is inspired by the map function and the reduce function of the functional programming languages such as Lisp, Haskell, or Python. One of the most important features of MapReduce is that it allows us to hide the low-level implementation such as message passing or synchronization from users and allows to split a problem into many partitions. This is a great way to make trivial parallelization of data processing without any need for communication between the partitions.

Tip

Google's original paper: MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters, can be found at http://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html.

MapReduce became main stream because of Apache Hadoop, which is an open source framework that was derived from Google's MapReduce paper. MapReduce allows us to process massive amounts of data in a distributed cluster. In fact, there are many implementations of the MapReduce programming...