Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Killing elephants - is MapReduce dying?


My English teacher in the last grade of high school had an interesting taste in literature, and taught us the story on  "Shooting and Elephant" by Orwell.   I was not a very good student in English and forgot about it until reading Colin Clark's Blog posting entitled : "It's time to kill the elephant".   From time to time there are various people claiming that various things are dead or dying.   Some of the readers may still remember the discussion about whether SOA is dead.   Recently the Forbes Blog has announced the death of ERP.  Colin's contribution to the hunt is the observation that MapReduce is dying (or should be dying) and the batch processing should be replace by more real-time processing.  His evidence is that Google is dumping MapReduce and using Colossus for its search technology.   While this fact is certainly true, I think that there are still many types of analytic procedures that are done off-line using batch processes, so while the use of real-time analytics will substantially increase given supporting infrastructure, I am not sure that batch will die soon (the same goes for SOA and ERP)...   Old soldiers never die - they just fade away (s-l-o-w-l-y).

1 comment:

Ronen Vaisenberg said...

For some reason, in the back of my mind, when I see a back and white picture with a yellow part I think its a picture from the holocaust.. I wonder if others feel awkward that way when looking at the picture in this post..