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back to article Microsoft completes Hadoop U-Turn, trumpets HDInsight on Azure

Microsoft has spun up a Hadoop service on its Azure cloud, capping off a tumultuous few years in which Redmond first competed against the open-source technology, then came round to it. The arrival of HDInsight as a general availability product on Azure was announced by Microsoft today, coming after the data muncher'n'cruncher …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Out of the loop...

    "...PowerPivot, Power View and the Excel 2013 add-on Power Map."

    Ok, so I'm not keeping up with the "Cloud" trend, but are these things really in demand for a "Cloud"? Or vice versa? Should I be awaiting to read about a Microsoft patch that fixes a bug so you can save Minesweeper progress to the cloud? Can you upload "Clippy" to the cloud, or do you need a "premium" service for that?

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  2. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Nope

    I don't know if Excel even supports large enough data sets to really need MapReduce, but MapReduce allows crunching through data sets that are too large for even the index to be stored in RAM on any individual system, the "Map" phase will split up the query into smaller tasks and send it to workers. The Reduce portion will take the results from these nodes and combine it back into an answer. This is quite a bit less efficient than a conventional database search, but pretty much infinitely scalable.

    In other words, I guess it's considered "cloud" now, but it's an actual solution for given problems rather than just marketing guys deciding to rename their racks of computers "cloud".

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  3. W. Anderson

    Microsoft - Condemning Open Source while thriving from it

    If Microsoft does not attempt to either control Hadoop by getting the development board of the Open source Project loaded with their own people or stealing the code designs to eventually bring out their own product -again, then it will be a new day - the end of the World as we know it?, and probably a new CEO at the company.

    Microsoft has never accepted the reality that many if not a majority of the very best Internet, Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Operating Systems technologies and innovation emanated from the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) world, therefore it will continue the pariah and draconian efforts to discredit FOSS while at the same time taking everything it can from the ecosystem, possibly without abiding by the legitimate copyright licenses or giving back to these communities.

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