After spending some time reading about Apache Hadoop, I decided it was time to get my hands dirty. So this weekend, I took the Hadoop Fundamentals 1 self-paced course on BigDataUniversity.com. It is a really nice way to play with Hadoop. You have the choice of downloading the software and installing it on your computer, working with a VMware image, or working in the cloud. I chose the option of working in the cloud. Within a few minutes I had a Amazon AWS account, a RightScale account, and the software installed in the cloud. By the way, although the course is FREE, I did incur some cloud-related usage charges. It amounted to approximately $1 in Amazon charges for the time it took me to complete the course.

The course itself is quite good. It is, as the abstract implies, a high-level overview. It describes the concepts involved in Hadoop environments, describes the Hadoop architecture, and provides an opportunity to follow tutorials for using Pig, Hive, and Jaql. It also provides a tutorial on using Flume. Because of my experience with JavaScript and JSON, I feel most comfortable using Jaql to query data in Hadoop. However, the DBAs among you will probably feel most comfortable with Hive, given its SQL-friendly approach.

If you are curious about Hadoop, I’d recommend this course. I’m eagerly anticipating the availability of the follow-on Hadoop course…