Hadoop and HDInsight: Big Data in Windows Azure

摘要

Lets begin with a bold assertion: "If you, your startup, or the enterprise you work for aren't saving massive quantities of data to disk for current and future analysis, you are compromising your effectiveness as a technical leader!' Isn't it foolish to base important business decisions on gut instinct alone, rather than real quantitative data? There are many reasons why big data is so pervasive. First, its amazingly cheap to collect and store data in any form, structured or unstructured, especially with the help of products such as Windows Azure Storage services. Second, its economical to leverage the cloud to provide the needed compute power-running on commodity hardware-to analyze this data. Finally, big data done well provides a major competitive advantage to businesses because its possible to extract undiscovered information from vast quantities of unstructured data. The purpose of this months article is to show how you can leverage the Windows Azure platform-in particular the Windows Azure HDInsight Service-to solve big data challenges.