Question

What is the MapReduce, please explain in simple terms?

Answer 1

MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster. MapReduce is the heart of Hadoop. It is this programming paradigm that allows for massive scalability across hundreds or thousands of servers in a Hadoop cluster. The MapReduce concept is fairly simple to understand for those who are familiar with clustered scale-out data processing solutions.

The term MapReduce actually refers to two separate and distinct tasks that Hadoop programs perform. The first is the map job, which takes a set of data and converts it into another set of data, where individual elements are broken down into tuples (key/value pairs). The reduce job takes the output from a map as input and combines those data tuples into a smaller set of tuples. As the sequence of the name MapReduce implies, the reduce job is always performed after the map job.