A perpetual debate rages about the effectiveness of a modern-day Data Analyst in a Distributed Computing environment. Analysts are used to SQL’s returning answers to their questions in short order. The RDBMS user is often unable to comprehend the root-cause when queries don’t return results for multiple hours. The opinions are divided, despite broad acceptance of the fact that Query Engines such as Hive and Spark are complex for the best engineers. At Acceldata, we see full TableScans run on multi-Tera Byte tables to get a count of rows, which to say the least is taboo in the Hadoop world. What results is a frustrating conversation between Cluster Admins and Data Users, which is devoid of data that is hard to collect. It is also a fact that data needs conversion into insights to make business decisions. More importantly, the value in Big Data needs to be unlocked without delays.
From here we start from the point where the Hadoop Admin/Engineer is ready to unravel the scores of metrics and interpret the reasons for poor performance and taking resources away from the cluster causing: