Data Warehouse vs Hadoop

Differences Between Data Warehouse vs Hadoop

In every decade, the IT industry experiences a major innovation that shakes the entire IT industry. In recent years, Apache Hadoop has done the same thing by infusing data centers with new infrastructure

By giving the power of parallel processing to the programmer Hadoop is on such an exponential rise in adoption and its ecosystem is expanding in both depth and breadth, it is natural to ask whether Hadoop’s is going to replace traditional Data Warehouse.

Let’s see what Alasdair Anderson (Executive Vice President at Nordea ) said at a Hadoop Summit about this hot topic in the town.

“There’s no relationship between the EDW and Hadoop right now — they are going to be complementary. It’s NOT about rip and replaces: we’re not going to get rid of RDBMS or MPP, but instead, use the right tool for the right job — and that will very much be driven by price.”

Whenever this interesting discussion starts a lot of questions come to our mind like:

1)      If you have big data, do you need a data warehouse?

2)     Will Hadoop Replace the Data Warehouse?

3)     Is this a death of traditional Data Warehouse era?

To know the answers to all these questions we need to look into the bigger context of this picture.

1. What is Hadoop?

Who hasn’t heard of Big Data lately? With hundreds of terabytes of data generated every day from different sources, it is clear that the today’s modern world is a Big Data world

When you start talking about Big Data you will sooner or later start discussing the hottest topic of the Big data world: Hadoop – but what exactly is it?

Hadoop is an open source, a Java-based programming framework that supports the processing and storage of extremely large data sets in a distributed computing environment.

The 4 Modules of Hadoop –

Hadoop is made up of 4 modules –

1. Distributed File-System

Distributed File System allows data to be stored in an easily accessible format, across a large number of linked storage devices.

2. Map Reduce

Map Reduce is the combination of two operations – reading data from the database and putting it into a format suitable for analysis (map) and performing mathematical operations (reduce).

3. Hadoop Common

Hadoop Common provides the tools needed for the data stored in HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System)

4. YARN

YARN manages resources of the systems storing the data and running the analysis.

2. What is Data Warehouse?

A data warehouse is a relational database that is designed for query and analysis data. It usually contains historical data derived from different sources.

Data warehouse environment includes ETL solutions, an online analytical processing (OLAP) engine, client analysis tools, and other applications that manage the process of analyzing data and delivering it to business users.

Let’s summarize what data warehouse is –

1. Subject-oriented

A data warehouse can be used to analyze a particular subject area like sales, finance, and inventory. Each subject area contains detailed data.

2. Integrated

A data warehouse integrates data from multiple data sources. For example, dates are in the same format,                     male/female codes are consistent. In a data warehouse, there will be only a single way of identifying a product             and they use the same customer record, not copies

3. Non-volatile

Data is stored in the data warehouse unmodified, and it will not change. So, historical data in a data warehouse should never be altered.

4. Time-variant

one can retrieve data from 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, or even older data from a data warehouse.

5. Not virtual

The data warehouse is a physical, persistent repository.

Data Warehouse vs Hadoop (Infographics)

Below is the Top 6 Comparisons between Data Warehouse vs Hadoop

Data Warehouse vs Hadoop –Which One to Use?

• If you have clean, consistent and high-quality data then you should go for Data Warehouse because Hadoop lacks data quality in some of its solutions.
• If you have Raw Unstructured Data, then you should go for Hadoop because Hadoop works well with unstructured/raw data but Data Warehouse works only with structured data.
• For Low Latency and Interactive Reports, you should go for Data Warehouse
• For OLTP/Real-time/ Point Queries you should go for Data Warehouse because Hadoop works well with batch data.
• For large volume data sets, you should go for Hadoop because Hadoop is designed to solve Big data problems.

Head to Head Comparison Table Between Data Warehouse vs Hadoop

Below is the list of points describe the Comparisons Between Data Warehouse vs Hadoop

Basis For Comparison	Data Warehouse	Hadoop
Data	In Data Warehouse we analyze structured and processed data	In Hadoop, we can process any kind of data including structured/unstructured/semi-structured and raw
Processing	Its processing is based on schema-on-write concepts	Its processing is based on schema-on-read concepts
Storage	Suitable for data with small volume and it’s too much expensive for large volume data	It works well with large data sets having huge volume, velocity, and variety
Agility	It is less agile and of fixed configuration	It is highly agile, configure and reconfigure as needed
Security	Data Warehouse technologies have been around for decades. Thus in term of security, we can rely on Data Warehouse	While Hadoop technologies are relatively new as compared to Data Warehouse, so security is a big concern here
Users	Business professionals usually use data warehouse	Hadoop is quite famous in the field of data science and data engineering

Conclusion – Data Warehouse vs Hadoop

Now we know about Data Warehouse and Hadoop both, let’s go back and examine the question that we asked at the start of this Data Warehouse and Hadoop article –

1) if you have big data, do you need a Data warehouse?

Answer – as long as your organization needs a reliable, believable and accessible data, then you need a data warehouse.

2) Will Hadoop Replace the Data Warehouse?

Answer – Comparing Data Warehouse vs Hadoop is like comparing apples and oranges. They both Data Warehouse and Hadoop have their own benefits in different use case scenarios. In some cases, we still dependent on traditional Data Warehouse techniques but as time changes we are more focusing on Hadoop Framework to handle Big Data problems.

3)Is this a death of traditional Data Warehouse era?

Answer – As you can see, this is not really a simple question and therefore does not lend itself well to a simple answer. It’s true that big data is going to change the traditional data warehousing approach in the coming next few years, but it will not obsolete the concepts and practice of data warehousing.

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