We agree with all of these criticisms. At the same time, we believe that MapReduce is not a passing fad, as witnessed by the rapidly growing MapReduce community, including many of the big Web 2.0 companies like Facebook, Yahoo!, and of course Google. Even traditional enterprise customers of RDBMSs, such as JP Morgan Chase [1], VISA [2], The New York Times [3] and China Mobile [4] have started investigating and embracing MapReduce. More than 80 companies and organizations are listed as users of Hadoop the open source version of MapReduce [5]. In fact, IBM is engaged with a number of enterprise customers to prototype novel Hadoop based solutions on massive amount of structured and unstructured data for their business analytics applications.
A few examples were provided in the talk given by IBM at the Hadoop Summit 2009 [6]. Therefore, it is very important to study analytic techniques on this new platform.