MapReduce was invented by Google in 2004, made into the Hadoop open source project by Yahoo! in 2007, and now is being used increasingly as a massively parallel data processing engine for Big Data.

When the Big Data moniker is applied to a discussion, it’s often assumed that Hadoop is, or should be, involved. But perhaps that’s just doctrinaire. Hadoop, at its core, consists of HDFS (the Hadoop ...